How long to formatt a 1tb hard drive

[Guest]

Hello,
my hard drives been workin good untill i tried to dl more films onto it and it wasnt showing up on my laptop,you couldnt even see what storage youd used it was just a picture of it ,upon dbl clicking it it said it had to be formatted...can anyone explain why as a thought it was broken untill it said to formatt?? many thanks ...

 

[willard]

Hello,
my hard drives been workin good untill i tried to dl more films onto it and it wasnt showing up on my laptop,you couldnt even see what storage youd used it was just a picture of it ,upon dbl clicking it it said it had to be formatted...can anyone explain why as a thought it was broken untill it said to formatt?? many thanks ...

Sounds fairly dead to me. When Windows tells you to format the drive, it means it can't understand the data on it. Formatting the drive may make it work again, but it also destroys the data.

If you're lucky, you just got a virus downloading your torrents and it corrupted your disk. In that case, you just lost all your data. If you're not so lucky, the drive itself is dead and you're out not only your data, but the a terabyte of storage space to boot.

There is some gray area in between, and you might be able to save your data. Go ahead and start by running chkdsk on your defective drive. Right click the drive in My Computer, choose Properties, then the Tools tab and finally click Check Now under Error Checking. Menus may be a bit different if you're not on Windows 7.

If you can't even get that far with the drive, or it doesn't work, then there may still be hope for your drive, but I'm guessing it's well outside your comfort zone. I don't mean that as an insult, it's just that people unclear on what formatting a disk does or means aren't usually very effective at hardware diagnostics.

To answer your original question, though, the format will only take a few minutes. Might be an hour or more if you choose full format, which is probably a good idea if you're having problems like this. Remember, though, formatting destroys your data.