Formatting a FAT32 disk

I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.

Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98.
I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single
Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB.

Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run:
format c: /u

It shows:
Formatting 4.102.5M
Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656

This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM.
The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while.

Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting?
Thanks

gargoyle60 wrote:

I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.

Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I
want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to
delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32
primary partition for the entire 4.1GB.

Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run:
format c: /u

It shows:
Formatting 4.102.5M
Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656

This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC,
Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to
take a while.

Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete
formatting?

Depends. There are reports on the www of format running for *days*.

Your hard drive is quite likely damaged. Physical damage to one or more
platters, that is, not a data error. This means that it's time to discard the
drive and using something else.

You *could* use a 3rd party util to figure out the bad sectors and work
around them, but damage tends to spread, and would result in data loss,
sooner or later. Best bet is to junk the drive. 4 GB I'd toss without a
second thought.

--
Marketers can promise the world,
but it's the engineers who have to deliver.

Auric wrote:

gargoyle60 wrote:

I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.

Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I
want to reload Windows 98. I have since used a GParted LiveCD to
delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single Fat32
primary partition for the entire 4.1GB.

Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run:
format c: /u

It shows:
Formatting 4.102.5M
Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656

This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC,
Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM. The machine is slow so I expected it to
take a while.

Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete
formatting?

Depends. There are reports on the www of format running for *days*.

Your hard drive is quite likely damaged. Physical damage to one or more
platters, that is, not a data error. This means that it's time to discard the
drive and using something else.

You *could* use a 3rd party util to figure out the bad sectors and work
around them, but damage tends to spread, and would result in data loss,
sooner or later. Best bet is to junk the drive. 4 GB I'd toss without a
second thought.

The smallest I see sold at newegg.com is 18.2GB starting at $69 but that
is for a SCSI drive. For $69, you could buy a much larger PATA or SATA
drive (the old computer probably only supports PATA aka IDE), like an
160GB WDC IDE drive for $50.

https://mintguide.org/system/283-how...inux-mint.html

That describes how to check for bad blocks. I'd also look at the
Current Pending Sector Count in the SMART data of the drive to see if
the bad blocks are actually getting re-mapped to reserve disk space. If
the count does not go down, all of the reserved space on the disk has
already been consumed so none of the current or future bad detected
blocks will get their data moved to have them reallocated to good space.
See https://kb.acronis.com/content/9133. For the drive to have spare
reserved space and for remapping to work for bad blocks, this value
should show as zero; i.e., any detected bad blocks have gotten moved to
available reserved disk space. To see how many bad blocks have been
remapped in the past, look at the Reallocated Sectors Count value. Mine
is zero which means none have shown up yet (it is a new drive and
remapping is performed at the factory during testing there - no magnetic
media is perfect so there will be some initial remapping). Pending
sectors (for remapping) cannot happen until the drive can successfully
read the data from the bad sector to move that data to a good sector in
the reserved disk space. If the data cannot be read (to copy it) then
the block remains pending. I use HD (Hard Disk) Sentinel to monitor the
SMART data. http://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility_os.php says it will
still work with Windows 98 but not earlier.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing...s-about-to-die

That article indicates the most important SMART values you should check
regarding the health of an HDD. Not sure SMART is of any value with
SSDs due to them masking bad memory blocks and their load balancing;
i.e., problems with SSDs are probably not gradually detectable but the
SSD just suddenly dies catastrophically.

Does the GPartd Live CD include inspection or monitoring tools to show
the SMART data of an HDD, especially the values mentioned in the above
article, like "smartctl --health dev" and "smartctl --all dev"?

On Thursday, October 6, 2016 at 7:46:16 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote:
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.

Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98.
I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single
Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB.

Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run:
format c: /u

It shows:
Formatting 4.102.5M
Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656

This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM.
The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while.

Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting?
Thanks

Those are pretty decent specs for a 98 box back in the day, you shouldn't be having troubles. I can recommend Bart's Disktool for testing your hard drive with and it will fit on that 98 boot floppy. If it passes, then I would erase it for 5 minutes to then bail out of the zero write 'test' there. Then I would use MS FDISK to create your FAT32 partition with which is on the boot floppy already and then you should have no trouble using format.com to pull off a format on it. You will have to reboot between Fdisk and format attempts.

I don't have any experience with any of the methods you are using, I can't know that it works.

On Thu, 6 Oct 2016 15:49:42 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

Does the GPartd Live CD include inspection or monitoring tools to show
the SMART data of an HDD, especially the values mentioned in the above
article, like "smartctl --health dev" and "smartctl --all dev"?

I don't know, I will need to check.

On Fri, 7 Oct 2016 01:23:58 -0700 (PDT), Lee wrote:

On Thursday, October 6, 2016 at 7:46:16 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote:
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.

Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98.
I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single
Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB.

Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run:
format c: /u

It shows:
Formatting 4.102.5M
Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656

This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM.
The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while.

Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting?
Thanks

Those are pretty decent specs for a 98 box back in the day, you shouldn't be having troubles. I can recommend Bart's Disktool for testing your hard drive with and it will fit on that 98 boot floppy. If it passes, then I would erase it for 5 minutes to then bail out of the zero write 'test' there. Then I would use MS FDISK to create your FAT32 partition with which is on the boot floppy already and then you should have no trouble using format.com to pull off a format on it. You will have to reboot between Fdisk and format attempts.

I don't have any experience with any of the methods you are using, I can't know that it works.

I was told (yonks ago) that the /U option is an undocumented very low-level format and can be slow.

I aborted the forrmat and tried MS FDISK which said everything was already correctly partitioned.
I did a "format c: /S" and it ran okay without any bad blocks being reported. I shall avoid using /U
in future.
Now Windows98 has installed and starts just fine.

On Thu, 6 Oct 2016 16:26:24 -0000 (UTC), "Auric__" wrote:

4 GB I'd toss without a
second thought.

I'm only keeping them as a novelty.
One 4GB drive will hold Windows 98, the other 4GB drive will serve as an extra Linux swap-space.

gargoyle60 wrote:

I was told (yonks ago) that the /U option is an undocumented very
low-level format and can be slow.

It means "unconditional", and it's mean to zero out the drive, not just write
a new file table (which is what happens with a "normal" format). It can take
a while, but it shouldn't be "hours"... certainly not on a 4 GB drive.

I aborted the forrmat and tried MS FDISK which said everything was
already correctly partitioned. I did a "format c: /S" and it ran okay
without any bad blocks being reported. I shall avoid using /U in future.
Now Windows98 has installed and starts just fine.

Now run scandisk and have it check for bad blocks (the "thorough" test).
Start the scan and walk away; it'll take a while.


Regarding your other post: keeping thedrives as a novelty is all fine and
dandy -- I had some full-height hard drives 20+ years after they were useful,
and still have a couple 5-1/4" floppy drives which are still seeing some
limited use -- but don't use them for anything "serious". Drives have a
finite life span.

--
You are an evil, evil man.

On Thu, 06 Oct 2016 14:46:15 +0100, gargoyle60 wrote:
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.

Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98.
I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single
Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB.

Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run:
format c: /u

It shows:
Formatting 4.102.5M
Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656

This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM.
The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while.

Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting?
Thanks

That HDD is dying since bad cluster is detected. Most probably worn out,
assuming that it's an old HDD.

Each time the format program encountered a bad sector, it'll retry for
several times. At hardware level, it'll probably about 3 times (i.e. sector
reformat). At software level, it'll be between 3 to 5 times (i.e. head
reseek then sector reformat). So, the total time it took to format a cluster
will depend on how severe the bad sector is in one cluster. If the damage is
severe enough, it may cause the hardware level formatting process to stuck.

No one know the health of your HDD, so it's difficult to estimate how long
the whole process would take. In worst case scenario, assuming that at least
one sector is bad in every cluster, the whole process would take about 5
times longer than the time it take to format the same HDD but healthy one
(without any bad sector).

On Friday, October 7, 2016 at 8:40:48 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote:
On Fri, 7 Oct 2016 01:23:58 -0700 (PDT), Lee wrote:

On Thursday, October 6, 2016 at 7:46:16 AM UTC-6, gargoyle60 wrote:
I have an old desktop PC in which I have been swapping HDDs.

Previously one of the drives, a 4.1GB, was used with Linux, which now I want to reload Windows 98.
I have since used a GParted LiveCD to delete/recreate the partition table and have created a single
Fat32 primary partition for the entire 4.1GB.

Now I have used an old Windows98 startup floppy disk and run:
format c: /u

It shows:
Formatting 4.102.5M
Trying to recover allocation unit 69,656

This has been running now for about 3 hours. It's an old desktop PC, Pentium II, 350MHz, 750MB RAM.
The machine is slow so I expected it to take a while.

Can anybody suggest how much longer this might take to complete formatting?
Thanks

Those are pretty decent specs for a 98 box back in the day, you shouldn't be having troubles. I can recommend Bart's Disktool for testing your hard drive with and it will fit on that 98 boot floppy. If it passes, then I would erase it for 5 minutes to then bail out of the zero write 'test' there. Then I would use MS FDISK to create your FAT32 partition with which is on the boot floppy already and then you should have no trouble using format..com to pull off a format on it. You will have to reboot between Fdisk and format attempts.

I don't have any experience with any of the methods you are using, I can't know that it works.

I was told (yonks ago) that the /U option is an undocumented very low-level format and can be slow.

I aborted the forrmat and tried MS FDISK which said everything was already correctly partitioned.
I did a "format c: /S" and it ran okay without any bad blocks being reported. I shall avoid using /U
in future.
Now Windows98 has installed and starts just fine.

You won't get any bad sector/cluster report with format except on floppies. Switch /U is not undocumented, type format /? and read about all the switches. What /U does is ignore the bad sector list and attempt to format all sectors. The reason it takes time is because you have a bad drive. Any other format simply adds bad sectors found at that time to the existing (and growing) bad sector list without telling you about any part of that.

You need to test it to see how bad it really is before you go using it or you may loose everything you put on it. If DiskTool won't complete it's non-destructive testing, the drive really belongs in the trash can.
All indications and advice is you have a bad drive going worse, ignore at your peril and have a nice day.