reformatting with ntfs

[krnjason]

when ive reformatted before, ive seen the options something on the along the lines of "reformat using NTFS (Quick)"
or "reformat using NTFS (full)" what are the differences and how much longer does the full take to install?

thank you

[ViRaL1]

Quick takes less than a minute. Full depends on the size of the drive. If it's for your own use, and if you haven't had any issues with drive errors or bad sectors there's not much point in a full format.

[guns1inger]

My understanding is that a full format actually overwrites the entire drive, a quick format just clears the indexes to make the disk look empty. A quick format is a lot easier to restore files from than a full format.

[jagabo]

Quick format erases the root directory and allocation tables. It's like erasing the table of contents in a book. All the text on the pages is still there.

A full format does the same but in addition it scans (read only) every sector on the disk looking for bad sectors. If bad sectors are found they are marked as such so they won't be used later on.

Modern drives use dynamic sector reallocation (invisible to the O/S) to remap bad sectors to good ones. So full formatting isn't really necessary.