Format query.

[microbrain]

I do not think that LiveCD properly formats the hard drive when installing. On a spare PC I was unable to boot any of 4 distros. When going back to XP the drive took almost an hour to format (yet only some 3 or 4 minutes with PCLOS).
THis was some tiome ago, recently the hard drive 'gave up'  and was replaced upon which PCLinuxOS booted without a problem.  Looking at the physical(as opposed to logical)  number of heads, cylinders, tracks & speed of rotation,  no way could linux have fully formatted a 320G drive in some 3 minutes.  I see reading through other threads that others may have suffered a similar (yet undiagnosed problem).

Is there a proper Linux Format program which actually performs a sector by sector verify?

MB.

[Joble]

Just a guess here, but did you install with "custom" partitions?  I don't think the default partitioning would use the entire drive.

In a terminal post the results of df to see the partition sizes.

[microbrain]

HI,
The new drive I put in was blank and thus I used the 'use entire disk' option, and the sum of the partitions is about right.  It definitely does not do a full spec format.

For example, (from my days at the IBM Disk manufacturing plant Havant England)  The format routine does nothing other than issue a block command for the drive to fill it's buffer with sequential chunks of data, read the checksum bytes (taken from the disk) and then compute the data checksum for the data in the buffer (it computes the checksum 'on the fly'. If the two checksums agree then the data is considered good, if not then there may be upto 500 yes, 500  retries (1 retry per rev) at 7200RPM a full set of retries takes only 3-4 seconds. Any single retry that is successful is good enough for MS to consider the drive as good.  At the end of all this no data has been written to the disk until a map is drawn up detailing any bad clusters (groups of sectors), then finally the boot record is re-written. Incidentally floppy disks are formatted cortrectly, ie a data pattern is written to then read back from, the disk.

for a 320Gbyte drive to format in three minutes would require a diskwrite speed of the order of  20 billion bits per second  which would mean a write frequency around 3 times that.  

[Was_Just19]

The usual 'format' of a Linux partition does nothing other than writing the necessary info so that anything reading it will know what filesystem the partition contains.

During that process you should get a prompt asking if you wish to check for "bad blocks" ......  which I think is the procedure you are referring to.

Try the PCLOS Control Center - Local Disks  and, using Expert Mode, format a partition and see if you get this prompt.