zero fill hard drive

stewartb · November 24th, 2004, 06:10 AM

Can you tell me why it's taking forever to zero fill a hard drive? I have been running a program from DiscWizard, as suggested on this site, and am only 37% thru the program after 13 hours! This was necessary because I was getting a "Data Error Reading Drive C" and am going to reinstall Windows once the program is completed. But I'm wondering, is it supposed to take this long ?

Chiguy · November 24th, 2004, 06:12 AM

How big is your hard drive? It can take a while if it's big.

stewartb · November 24th, 2004, 06:29 AM

I don't know but the hard drive must be pretty big considering the length of time it's taking to do this. It's an old PC, had Windows 95 installed. But at this rate it will take appx 36 hours to do this, can that be right? Doctor Reno gave me the instructions and procedure to follow to zero fill this hard drive and then reinstall Windows.

Bovon · November 24th, 2004, 10:11 AM

If its that old with W95 on the drive...and the drive is from that same era.. I suspect the drive is faulty...especially since you say it already gave you a data error reading drive C:

Personally, I believe I would can that one. 13 hours should be enough to write to a 200 gb drive if nothing was wrong with it.

stewartb · November 24th, 2004, 10:23 AM

Well, it is now over 17 hours and 45%," writing zeros to the drive". It's just sitting in my basement not harming anyone. Are you saying after all is said and done this may not work, or just that you wouldn't be bothered?? Also, I want to be sure I'm doing what Doc Reno suggested properly, I went thru the 2 disc floppy with the Discwizard program and chose the Utilities: "writing zero to the drive" was that the right thing to do??

LeftCoast · November 24th, 2004, 10:44 AM

I'm with Bovon on this one. If the drive is as old as the installed OS, I'd can it. Probably so small, not worth it even if the HDD was not suspect.

How many gigs in the HDD?

I use www.killdisk.com for zeroing out HDDs.

stewartb · November 24th, 2004, 11:01 AM

Doc Reno suggested DiscWizard

paul9 · November 24th, 2004, 11:09 AM

you should do a reformat and a thorough scandisk once it completes. this will also take a while, but should weed out any bad sectors on the drive.

LeftCoast · November 24th, 2004, 11:16 AM

Something is obviously wrong, unless your Win95 HDD is about 600 gigs.

KD (which I've used many times) will tell you the size of the HDD you want to work with. New HDDs are dirt cheap (especially this Friday), and again, your HDD is likely to be small and perhaps not worth the effort.

Bovon · November 24th, 2004, 10:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stewartb

Are you saying after all is said and done this may not work, or just that you wouldn't be bothered??

If the drive is as old as I think it is...both!!

I have zero filled several drives...some in the 100 gb range and RPMs at (or above)5400.

The most time consumed I can recall was around 2 hours.

I tried to zero fill a WD 40 gb 7200 RPM a couple of months ago, and it was taking forever. I stopped that, formatted the drive (found errors) and then ran scandisk (from DOS). I never did get scandisk run all the way...so, I finally just canned the drive.

If that drive you have is (say 8 to 10 years old) its rpm will be around 1000(?) and so slow you can start Win95 loading, go eat lunch and still get back to the machine before the splash screen/desktop comes up.

What we are trying to say here is...a hard drive 8 or so years old would be around 450 mb or less...maybe 540.