Hello Sirs and Mams,

I have noticed that some of my Hard Drive failures I have delt with were hard drives that were formatted in a "Quick Format"

or a "Quick Erase" by various applications. My question is: Is there a difference between the "Quick Format" and the "Full

Format?" I have recieved varring answers in the past on this subject, but nothing solid. Here are the applications that allow

the quick format type...

- Ontrack Disk Manager v10.46
- Microsoft Windows 2K, xp...ect
- Acronis Disk Director Suite

Some input would be appriciated

Thank you very much,

balchund

A quick format only removes the bootsectors, and marks the rest of the data as "available"

A "format" does the same thing, but also runs CHKDSK on the drive.


Neither of these remove data from the drive. Both of these remove the boot sector, and mark the rest of the sectors as available. This means if you perform a "quick format" or "format" and put no data on that drive, basically all of the data on that drive is extractable, save the boot sector. The only way to ensure that the data is gone completely is to do a "zero-fill" which writes 0 byte data too every single sector on the drive, thus ACTUALLY overwriting the data that was on that drive.

Russ,

Thank you for the reply. My question is not security, but about data stability. Is it just as safe to perform a "Quick Erase" to a new HDD when using it for a new OS, or is it better to use a full format type.

Your input is much appreciated.

Thank you very much,

balchund

If it is a new drive, quick format is plenty enough.


If it is a drive that is having trouble with OS corruption, do regular format, because there may be bad sectors on the drive that need to be removed.

of course, if your OS keeps getting corrupted there are so many possiblities to rule out. Typically if you think your drive is the cause for data corruption/loss , you should test it using a program like MHDD, and find out for sure before you trust it with your valuable data.


or the easy way...

Always keep as many backups as you can!

Russ,

Thank you very much for the answer.

balchund

Nothing is best. Its do nothing behind the same logic.

This is the answer about Quick N Full
http://forum.csebd.net/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=44

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