this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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How to fully format external HD without leaving it running for days? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Weird problem but yeah, here goes:

I have a 4TB external HD (actually a regular HD on a USB dock but whatever, I guess) which I think has bad sectors. I'd like to complete a full format on it and use it as a secondary dump/backup/TV media drive. However, I have noticed I never have enough time to format it. I can't leave my computer running, stuck to a clunky USB device for what seems to be multiple days.

Is there any other way? Can I partition it and format it in partitions and then merge them for the same effect of bad sectors checked? If I ever quick format an HD, will whatever check disk done on it in the past canish and all bad sectors are in use again?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You need to perform a low level format to get all of the bad sectors marked. After that, you can partition and perform a normal format. When that is complete, if it still shows as bad in CrystalDickInfo, I wouldn't trust it.