General Format Question

[btvillarin]

I wonder about something I recently did.
Instead of just a regular "format c:", I typed "format c: /q" to execute a quick format. What are the differences between the two? Pros and cons? One thing is for sure, one's quicker especially with the gigabyte hard drives of today.

 

[stonerboy]

/q switch is used on a disk that has been previously formatted. It just does a high level format of the disk instead of the regular format command. Much faster than the regular format command with no switches.

/u switch is used on a new or old disk to speed up the format process or on a disk where you have received read and write errors during the use of the disk. The is an unconditional format which destroys all existing data on a disk and prevents you from using the UNFORMAT command.

/f switch is used to specify the size of the diskette to format.

/s switch is used to specify that the disk will be a system disk (making it bootable).

The /q switch cannot be used on a brand new hard disk.

 

[ejsmith2]

/q just wipes out the FAT. It doesn't look at anything else on the drive. It's like doing a 'quick' erase of a cdrw. Just the first few sectors are cleaned out. You can still recover every single bit of data on the drive if you use /q. That is, until you start writing to it again.