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Slow Reformat - Inspiron 9300

post #1 of 11
6/2/07 at 5:18pm
Thread Starter 
Hi,

As i mentioned above, i have an inspiron 9300.

Ive had it for 18 months now and done a number of reformats on it but today it is taking a very long time.

It has been on for an hour and has only reached 10% on the 'setup is formatting' part.

As far as i know there was nothing wrong with my computer before, it was not behaving any different as normal so this is very frustrating.

Has anyone got any advice on what i need to do to speed it up?

Im guessing i cant stop the format now as it has already started?...

Thanks in advance.
Chris
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post #2 of 11
6/2/07 at 5:28pm
Sorry, I don't have an answer for your question, but am curious as to why you'd reformat and reinstall Windows if there were ". . . nothing wrong with my computer . . . ." I reformat only as a last resort - it's such a damn pain - and I'm extremely lazy.

Hope you get some help from wiser folks.
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post #3 of 11
6/2/07 at 5:32pm
Thread Starter 
I like to reformat once in a while just to clean up my computer.
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post #4 of 11
6/2/07 at 6:39pm
Reformats in my expereince, and ive done plenty but they take about 2 hours, maybe 2.5 hrs Then another 2 hrs to reiswntall 3rd party software. It will take up your afternoon, and yess formatting does take some time, mine takes about 30-40 minutes. Its also somewhat important to note that when its formatting, MY (I say my cuz i dont wana speak 4 ne1 else) format tends to 'jump' So it will be at 10% then a few minutes later jump to 15% or somethin, so just let it run its course and youll have ur laptop back in no time. Also if your worried about hardware issues run the dell disgnostic, im not sure how effective it is but hey it may tuen somrthing up, it picked up my faulty GPU card. GL
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post #5 of 11
6/5/07 at 9:18am
Is there a reason not to make it a "quick format" which is what I do and it only takes a minute or so.
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post #6 of 11
6/5/07 at 10:13am
Not sure but the quick format but i use the option 'format w/ the NTFS file system'
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post #7 of 11
6/6/07 at 11:29am
Thread Starter 
Forgot to come back on here, i decided to cancel the format (which i stopped after 5 hours by the way, it was still only at 60%, very weird) and chose a 'quick format' which worked and was done within 45 mins or so.

Still not sure what was wrong with it but it seems to be running ok now.
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post #8 of 11
6/6/07 at 3:34pm
Standard format should take no longer than 10 minutes, a quick format (which just wipes out the FAT tables should take about 1 minute

You have bad sectors on your drive. The computer is having trouble writing to that area of the disk. you need to check the SMART status of the drive (F12 when system is booting & run diagnostics).


If it does not report any SMART errors on the initial diag, or the comprehensive diag that follows I would use a disk checking utility such as scandisk, or another 3rd party app & scan the drive for errors, including free space.
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post #9 of 11
6/8/07 at 12:14pm
Yeah, it does sound like something is wrong. However, a full format of a hard drive can take quite a while depending on the size of the drive, the amount of data it contains (a full drive will take longer to format than a mostly empty drive), and the speed of your computer. However, 5 hours is definitely out of the norm.
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post #10 of 11
6/8/07 at 3:27pm
I have a dimension 2400 which exhibited the same problem now that I recall it took nearly 14 hours to reformat (I went to bed starting the format and the progress bar was only 60% when I awoke) I thought the harddrive could be the culprit but eventually after replacing every part on the system it turns out the motherboard was the issue.
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post #11 of 11
6/14/07 at 12:28pm
Nice name...lol My name is chris campbell as well. I've had that happen before when I was formatting a drive. In my experience it's always been a drive going bad
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