I'm in the process of building a new computer ....

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 21:16:22 +1200, Eric Stevens
wrote:

On Thu, 04 Aug 2016 21:31:57 -0700, Bill W
wrote:

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 15:55:54 +1200, Eric Stevens
wrote:

On Thu, 04 Aug 2016 23:03:05 -0400, nospam
wrote:

what exactly was bundled and what function did you select?

It was labelled 'Seagate Disc Wizard' but turned out to be 'Acronis
Disk Director'.

Some time ago I put my newly purchased 4 TB into service with its as
bought MTB formatting. It was an emergency and I thought that would be
enough to contain the copy of my backup files. And it was too, until I
slammed into the 2 TB and it would hold no more. Neither I nor my
computer could communicate with it in any meaningful way.

I hauled out the Seagate software and told it I wanted to
add/partition a new disc. It found there was data on the disk and that
all this would be lost. 'Was that OK?'. I expected this so told it go
ahead. That was monday afternoon. It finished whatever it was doing
this morning (Friday) and let me proceed with the rest of the task
which took about 10 minutes. So right now its copying backup files as
fast as its USB2 drive will let it. But I have been wondering what it
was doing that took so long.

What are these MTB & UEFI things? Why aren't you using NTFS? And it
should take no time at all to format discs.

MTB (should be MBR) and UEFI refer to the underlying format of the
disc. It's relatively new and refers to the way data is formated on
the disc. But UEFI is much more than that. MBR is the old fashioned
way of doing this and imposes a limit of 2 TB on the capacity which
can be recognised on a disc. UEFI is much more than that and employs
GUID which is a new disk architecture that expands on the older Master
Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to
Intel-based computers. UEFI enables Windows to recognise more than 2
TB on a disc. UEFI will be hitting us all soon, even if it hasn't hit
us already. Hopefully it won't be making any difficulties for us
unless, like me, you are involved in a transition from one to another.

But now you're talking about partitioning, not formatting. There was
never any reason to do anything other than format, and NTFS is the
file system you want to choose. Since this is a 4 TB disc, there is
nothing you needed to change, especially regarding any partitions. No
one is going to sell a 4 TB disc with any 2 TB limits. In fact, it is
older operating systems and bios's that imposed that limit, never the
disc itself. Were you using an older PC?

If it was running that long, you might have chosen indexing, or
compression, but even those things don't take that long. Or were you
creating a disc image?

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 09:37:02 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

what exactly was bundled and what function did you select?

It was labelled 'Seagate Disc Wizard' but turned out to be 'Acronis
Disk Director'.

Some time ago I put my newly purchased 4 TB into service with its as
bought MTB formatting. It was an emergency and I thought that would be
enough to contain the copy of my backup files. And it was too, until I
slammed into the 2 TB and it would hold no more. Neither I nor my
computer could communicate with it in any meaningful way.

I hauled out the Seagate software and told it I wanted to
add/partition a new disc. It found there was data on the disk and that
all this would be lost. 'Was that OK?'. I expected this so told it go
ahead. That was monday afternoon. It finished whatever it was doing
this morning (Friday) and let me proceed with the rest of the task
which took about 10 minutes. So right now its copying backup files as
fast as its USB2 drive will let it. But I have been wondering what it
was doing that took so long.

What are these MTB & UEFI things? Why aren't you using NTFS? And it
should take no time at all to format discs.

MTB (should be MBR) and UEFI refer to the underlying format of the
disc. It's relatively new and refers to the way data is formated on
the disc. But UEFI is much more than that. MBR is the old fashioned
way of doing this and imposes a limit of 2 TB on the capacity which
can be recognised on a disc. UEFI is much more than that and employs
GUID which is a new disk architecture that expands on the older Master
Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to
Intel-based computers. UEFI enables Windows to recognise more than 2
TB on a disc. UEFI will be hitting us all soon, even if it hasn't hit
us already. Hopefully it won't be making any difficulties for us
unless, like me, you are involved in a transition from one to another.

you did something more than transition.

What I wrote is exactly correct: I did transition.

reformatting is quick.

What I did was transition a disk that was filled with data. The
software erased all that and my guess is that it may even have written
new sector markers on the recording surface if it was necessary to
change the disk sector size. It then wrote zeros into all the bytes on
the disk. From there it went on to set up the empty file system
required by the reformat.

The last part (of the above) is the quick part of the process. The
rest required visiting each sector at least once and it is this that
took the time. Obviously it had to do more than the part you refer to
as reformatting.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

Some time ago I put my newly purchased 4 TB into service with its as
bought MTB formatting. It was an emergency and I thought that would be
enough to contain the copy of my backup files. And it was too, until I
slammed into the 2 TB and it would hold no more. Neither I nor my
computer could communicate with it in any meaningful way.

I hauled out the Seagate software and told it I wanted to
add/partition a new disc. It found there was data on the disk and that
all this would be lost. 'Was that OK?'. I expected this so told it go
ahead. That was monday afternoon. It finished whatever it was doing
this morning (Friday) and let me proceed with the rest of the task
which took about 10 minutes. So right now its copying backup files as
fast as its USB2 drive will let it. But I have been wondering what it
was doing that took so long.

What are these MTB & UEFI things? Why aren't you using NTFS? And it
should take no time at all to format discs.

MTB (should be MBR) and UEFI refer to the underlying format of the
disc. It's relatively new and refers to the way data is formated on
the disc. But UEFI is much more than that. MBR is the old fashioned
way of doing this and imposes a limit of 2 TB on the capacity which
can be recognised on a disc. UEFI is much more than that and employs
GUID which is a new disk architecture that expands on the older Master
Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to
Intel-based computers. UEFI enables Windows to recognise more than 2
TB on a disc. UEFI will be hitting us all soon, even if it hasn't hit
us already. Hopefully it won't be making any difficulties for us
unless, like me, you are involved in a transition from one to another.

you did something more than transition.

What I wrote is exactly correct: I did transition.

transition from mbr to uefi is maybe a minute, tops, likely half that.

you did more.

reformatting is quick.

What I did was transition a disk that was filled with data. The
software erased all that and my guess is that it may even have written
new sector markers on the recording surface if it was necessary to
change the disk sector size.

not only didn't it do that but it *can't* do that. there is no ata
command to rewrite sectors.

It then wrote zeros into all the bytes on
the disk.

that would be a secure erase, which was not necessary and a complete
waste of time.

From there it went on to set up the empty file system
required by the reformat.

to do that only requires rewriting the directory.

The last part (of the above) is the quick part of the process.

and it's all that's needed, along with a new partition scheme.

The
rest required visiting each sector at least once and it is this that
took the time. Obviously it had to do more than the part you refer to
as reformatting.

and a complete waste.

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 09:07:32 -0700, Bill W
wrote:

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 21:16:22 +1200, Eric Stevens
wrote:

On Thu, 04 Aug 2016 21:31:57 -0700, Bill W
wrote:

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 15:55:54 +1200, Eric Stevens
wrote:

On Thu, 04 Aug 2016 23:03:05 -0400, nospam
wrote:

what exactly was bundled and what function did you select?

It was labelled 'Seagate Disc Wizard' but turned out to be 'Acronis
Disk Director'.

Some time ago I put my newly purchased 4 TB into service with its as
bought MTB formatting. It was an emergency and I thought that would be
enough to contain the copy of my backup files. And it was too, until I
slammed into the 2 TB and it would hold no more. Neither I nor my
computer could communicate with it in any meaningful way.

I hauled out the Seagate software and told it I wanted to
add/partition a new disc. It found there was data on the disk and that
all this would be lost. 'Was that OK?'. I expected this so told it go
ahead. That was monday afternoon. It finished whatever it was doing
this morning (Friday) and let me proceed with the rest of the task
which took about 10 minutes. So right now its copying backup files as
fast as its USB2 drive will let it. But I have been wondering what it
was doing that took so long.

What are these MTB & UEFI things? Why aren't you using NTFS? And it
should take no time at all to format discs.

MTB (should be MBR) and UEFI refer to the underlying format of the
disc. It's relatively new and refers to the way data is formated on
the disc. But UEFI is much more than that. MBR is the old fashioned
way of doing this and imposes a limit of 2 TB on the capacity which
can be recognised on a disc. UEFI is much more than that and employs
GUID which is a new disk architecture that expands on the older Master
Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to
Intel-based computers. UEFI enables Windows to recognise more than 2
TB on a disc. UEFI will be hitting us all soon, even if it hasn't hit
us already. Hopefully it won't be making any difficulties for us
unless, like me, you are involved in a transition from one to another.

But now you're talking about partitioning, not formatting. There was
never any reason to do anything other than format, and NTFS is the
file system you want to choose. Since this is a 4 TB disc, there is
nothing you needed to change, especially regarding any partitions. No
one is going to sell a 4 TB disc with any 2 TB limits. In fact, it is
older operating systems and bios's that imposed that limit, never the
disc itself. Were you using an older PC?

As far as I can make out UEFI is new way of booting a computer from a
storage device and supplants the old BIOS which boots from a Master
Boot Record (MBR). Nevertheless it is presently common to include a
MBR on a UEFI configured device so that the machine can be booted from
BIOS if the machine is not UEFI enabled. Apparently all versions of
Windows since XP include (a varying degree of) support for UEFI.

The question of addressable disk size is at the heart of all this. MBR
uses 32 bits for storing block addresses and cannot handle more than
2TB for disks with 512 byte sectors. UEFI uses a 64 bit system known
as GPT and can handle *far* larger disk sizes.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table for a partial
explanation.


If it was running that long, you might have chosen indexing, or
compression, but even those things don't take that long. Or were you
creating a disc image?

I was converting to a UEFI disk.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 09:37:03 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

Apart from the fact that there is a hell of a lot of it (4 TB), have
you any idea of what it might be doing? The disc had data on it before
I started this process.

what exactly was bundled and what function did you select?

It was labelled 'Seagate Disc Wizard' but turned out to be 'Acronis
Disk Director'.

Some time ago I put my newly purchased 4 TB into service with its as
bought MTB formatting. It was an emergency and I thought that would be
enough to contain the copy of my backup files. And it was too, until I
slammed into the 2 TB and it would hold no more. Neither I nor my
computer could communicate with it in any meaningful way.

I hauled out the Seagate software and told it I wanted to
add/partition a new disc. It found there was data on the disk and that
all this would be lost. 'Was that OK?'. I expected this so told it go
ahead. That was monday afternoon. It finished whatever it was doing
this morning (Friday) and let me proceed with the rest of the task
which took about 10 minutes. So right now its copying backup files as
fast as its USB2 drive will let it. But I have been wondering what it
was doing that took so long.

the only thing i can think of is a secure erase which writes 0 to all
sectors, because reformatting is fairly quick. less than a minute.

Writing 0 to all sectors is what I used to know as as a 'deep format'.

also sometimes called low level format, both of which are incorrect
terminology.

writing 0 to all sectors is just that, writing 0. it does not alter the
format in any way.

Agreed, but a quick format leaves the user data on the disk almost
entirely untouched. Overwriting it with 0 avoids any possible
downstream problems.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On Fri, 5 Aug 2016 08:56:00 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:


| It was labelled 'Seagate Disc Wizard' but turned out to be 'Acronis
| Disk Director'.
|

Just a suggestion, but I think it's well worth buying
good disk management software. I use BootIt. Acronis
is also popular. Some people use Macrium. Whatever
you get, you should be able to easily partition, do disk
image backup, set active partition, etc. Windows disk
management tools are limited. Freebies that come with
disks are partial. (They have to be. If you could get
fully functional software with every hard disk purchase
there would be no reason to buy it.)

I intend to try Acronis.

Then you could back up your new Windows install as
an image, partition the 4 TB into a number of data
partitions, and you're all set. Then you can also store
disk images in one of those partitions, in case disk #0
dies unexpectedly.

If you also make a disk image with motherboard drivers
removed then you're covered in the event that you have
to build a completely new machine and want to move
Windows to it. You won't have to install from scratch,
find your Windows install disk, or find all of your
software disks.
All of that is not required, but it makes for an efficient
backup system.

--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

the only thing i can think of is a secure erase which writes 0 to all
sectors, because reformatting is fairly quick. less than a minute.

Writing 0 to all sectors is what I used to know as as a 'deep format'.

also sometimes called low level format, both of which are incorrect
terminology.

writing 0 to all sectors is just that, writing 0. it does not alter the
format in any way.

Agreed, but a quick format leaves the user data on the disk almost
entirely untouched. Overwriting it with 0 avoids any possible
downstream problems.

only if you're worried about someone scavenging the data.

if not, then there's no issue whatsoever.

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 18:57:36 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

Some time ago I put my newly purchased 4 TB into service with its as
bought MTB formatting. It was an emergency and I thought that would be
enough to contain the copy of my backup files. And it was too, until I
slammed into the 2 TB and it would hold no more. Neither I nor my
computer could communicate with it in any meaningful way.

I hauled out the Seagate software and told it I wanted to
add/partition a new disc. It found there was data on the disk and that
all this would be lost. 'Was that OK?'. I expected this so told it go
ahead. That was monday afternoon. It finished whatever it was doing
this morning (Friday) and let me proceed with the rest of the task
which took about 10 minutes. So right now its copying backup files as
fast as its USB2 drive will let it. But I have been wondering what it
was doing that took so long.

What are these MTB & UEFI things? Why aren't you using NTFS? And it
should take no time at all to format discs.

MTB (should be MBR) and UEFI refer to the underlying format of the
disc. It's relatively new and refers to the way data is formated on
the disc. But UEFI is much more than that. MBR is the old fashioned
way of doing this and imposes a limit of 2 TB on the capacity which
can be recognised on a disc. UEFI is much more than that and employs
GUID which is a new disk architecture that expands on the older Master
Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to
Intel-based computers. UEFI enables Windows to recognise more than 2
TB on a disc. UEFI will be hitting us all soon, even if it hasn't hit
us already. Hopefully it won't be making any difficulties for us
unless, like me, you are involved in a transition from one to another.

you did something more than transition.

What I wrote is exactly correct: I did transition.

transition from mbr to uefi is maybe a minute, tops, likely half that.

you did more.

reformatting is quick.

What I did was transition a disk that was filled with data. The
software erased all that and my guess is that it may even have written
new sector markers on the recording surface if it was necessary to
change the disk sector size.

not only didn't it do that but it *can't* do that. there is no ata
command to rewrite sectors.

4.13 and associated text of
http://www.t13.org/documents/Uploade...a-ATA8-ACS.pdf
seems to say different, not quite in the basic way I described but the
effect is similar.

It then wrote zeros into all the bytes on
the disk.

that would be a secure erase, which was not necessary and a complete
waste of time.

Maybe, but it did something. I have already asked you for your
thoughts on the subject.

From there it went on to set up the empty file system
required by the reformat.

to do that only requires rewriting the directory.

Yep

The last part (of the above) is the quick part of the process.

and it's all that's needed, along with a new partition scheme.

The
rest required visiting each sector at least once and it is this that
took the time. Obviously it had to do more than the part you refer to
as reformatting.

and a complete waste.

--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On Fri, 05 Aug 2016 19:08:22 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

the only thing i can think of is a secure erase which writes 0 to all
sectors, because reformatting is fairly quick. less than a minute.

Writing 0 to all sectors is what I used to know as as a 'deep format'.

also sometimes called low level format, both of which are incorrect
terminology.

writing 0 to all sectors is just that, writing 0. it does not alter the
format in any way.

Agreed, but a quick format leaves the user data on the disk almost
entirely untouched. Overwriting it with 0 avoids any possible
downstream problems.

only if you're worried about someone scavenging the data.

if not, then there's no issue whatsoever.

A commerial product can't afford any shortcuts which might leave them
at risk from some user in the future.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

you did something more than transition.

What I wrote is exactly correct: I did transition.

transition from mbr to uefi is maybe a minute, tops, likely half that.

you did more.

reformatting is quick.

What I did was transition a disk that was filled with data. The
software erased all that and my guess is that it may even have written
new sector markers on the recording surface if it was necessary to
change the disk sector size.

not only didn't it do that but it *can't* do that. there is no ata
command to rewrite sectors.

4.13 and associated text of
http://www.t13.org/documents/Uploade...a-ATA8-ACS.pdf
seems to say different, not quite in the basic way I described but the
effect is similar.

it doesn't say different at all.

hard drives have had 4k sectors for a while and some of them can
emulate 512b sectors for compatibility.

the point is that it's *not* rewriting sector boundaries.

It then wrote zeros into all the bytes on
the disk.

that would be a secure erase, which was not necessary and a complete
waste of time.

Maybe, but it did something. I have already asked you for your
thoughts on the subject.

obviously it did something.

the point is that what it did was a complete waste of time.

From there it went on to set up the empty file system
required by the reformat.

to do that only requires rewriting the directory.

Yep

so you agree you wasted several days of time.