Formatting a 200gb Seagate with my Server 2003 disc takes 5 minutes...

Is this a Maxtor drive?

Been awhile since I formatted a big drive. I've got about 13 external enclosures that when I add the HD to 'em initially I do a full format but it's been quite awhile since I did that and I don't remember how long it took. I just let 'em format over night.

Is that a quick format or a full format? I guess a quick format should only take 10 seconds though...

Your disk probably got formatted with a much higher allocation/cluster/whatever size I bet. I left mine on Default, but it probably picked a small value (my other drives/partitions/volumes/whatever seem to be at 4KB). The upshot is that you save a lot of space (that would be wasted due to internal fragmentation) and the downside is that the MFT is bigger and disk access speed goes down faster as fragmentation increases (since the drive will be jumping around more to fetch smaller pieces of data).

I should have set the largest allocation size possible, since I plan to use it as one giant swapfile until I get the rest of the parts for my new computer. Oh well.

DosFreak: Nah, it's a Seagate 160GB 7200RPM EIDE ATA100 8MB cache. I have a 120GB WD and 80GB Maxtor in the computer too (the WD is the other one I said took forever - don't remember how long the Maxtor took)

Quick reformat with larger clusters/allocation units

😜

ribbon13: I would do that, but my main purpose in throwing the drive into my current system is to burn it in before buying the rest of my parts. I plan to do a surface scan after it's done formatting and before making the swapfile.

It's now been going for a good two hours...

I would use Partition Magic or the such. At least it tells you THE TIME NEEDED TO PERFORM THE TASK.
I remember there are two different format processes QUICK and NORMAL. The Normal can be a pain in the butt until finishes, at least for newer humongous hard drives. And, by the way, it doesn't matter that much that the drive is 7200rpm, ATA100 or whatever. It will take SOME TIME.

Yes I didn't expect it to be lightning fast, but taking hours upon hours is ridiculous as well. I tihnk I may have found a contributing problem though: I had installed VIA's IDE miniport driver to see how it performs. I uninstalled it and reinstalled the filter driver included with the latest 4-in-1's and it seemed to make a big difference. For example, while running a bad sector scan on the new drive, I was able to load a program from a drive on the same IDE channel within seconds, when it took a minute or two with the miniport driver installed.

The Disk Management tool gives you a percent-formatted indicator. Perhaps you just didn't see it.

Actually, it doesn't show a percentage until it gets to 1 or 2 percent complete. After running it for a couple hours last night it still wasn't showing a percentage.

As a result, I didn't believe you when I read your post, so I started a new format and took a screenshot just now (attached). I noticed a minute later that it had actually started showing one though. It's currently cooking along at 13% complete after around 5 minutes.

It definitely, DEFINITELY should not take hours for it to do 1% of the drive. A format of an 80GB drive takes about 20 minutes.

Yep, it finished quite quickly this time around - I'm convinced now that it was that miniport driver that was slowing the format to a crawl.