Just a couple questions about installing a new hdd.  Can someone tell me what happens, when a new/bare hdd is installed and has to be 'initialized' in Disk Management?   Also when I format a drive/partition with Disk Management tools it can take 40 minutes (for a 120GB drive by my experience), but if I format with a program like Partition Magic it takes maybe only one minute, what's up with that?  :-)

Dirk B wrote on Apr 11^th, 2009 at 12:42pm:

Can someone tell me what happens, when a new/bare hdd is installed and has to be 'initialized' in Disk Management?

I think that's just the initial formating.  HD's come low-level formatted these days, so there's no real 'initialization' that has to happen beyond the first format.


Dirk B wrote on Apr 11^th, 2009 at 12:42pm:

Also when I format a drive/partition with Disk Management tools it can take 40 minutes (for a 120GB drive by my experience), but if I format with a program like Partition Magic it takes maybe only one minute, what's up with that?

There are two ways to format a drive - 'full' format, and 'quick' format.  Most programs, including Disk Management, offer both.  

Quick is very quick even on large drives because all it does is create the filesystem.  Full will scan the whole drive for bad sectors, so it can take a long time for large drives, but removing bad sectors will give you better performance and reliability overall.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302686

As many (old) techs of my age, I still DOS Partition and format every new drive that I get.
That writes and reads every sector on the HD's surface.  Any bad blocks or blocks that cannot reliably hold data, will be blocked out and put into a Bad-Blocks list, where they will never be used.
Oh yes, it takes a while, but it's also the most reliable format you'll ever get.  
It pays dividends if you're going to trust that drive to your OS and data.
All new drives have some Bad Blocks on them, but those are normally  blocked out during the Low Level Format at the Factory.

I've recovered several IDE drives this year, by running a Low Level Format routine on them, which scans every sector and blocks out the bad ones.
So far, I don't have a LLF program that runs on a SATA HD.

If I'm going to, for instance, test Windows 7 on that drive, I then reformat it in Windows as an NTFS partition.  Win Vista and 7 won't load on a FAT-32 formatted partition. :-[

@ Dirk B


Dirk B wrote on Apr 11^th, 2009 at 12:42pm:

what happens, when a new/bare hdd is installed and has to be 'initialized' in Disk Management?

This is just writing a MBR. If you write a "Std MBR" to an empty HD with another tool such as BING, you won't be asked to "Initialize" when that HD is seen it Disk Management .