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Different between quick format and complete format
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Posted by: hakee
Hey guys:
I've got a question, what is the difference between a quick format and a complete format on a hard drive?
If I'm not mistaken a quick format only erases the FAT that's found on the physcial disk itself and a complete format erases everything that's found on the drive.....right?
Please anyone feel free to correct me, thx.
Posted by: C-Money
 Quote:
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Originally Posted by hakee
If I'm not mistaken a quick format only erases the FAT that's found on the physcial disk itself and a complete format erases everything that's found on the drive.....right?
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Yep. 
Posted by: BooRadley
Unless something's changed, I thought quick format would just delete, same as using the 'del' command, all the data, leaving the actual structure in place, and format whacked the allocation structure and built a new one, destroying and rebuilding the allocation table.
If you want to actually destroy the data so it's not recoverable, you need to zero-fill it a couple times. You can find utilities to do that, though it's only a couple lines of code to write one yourself. It's possible to format a disk, then recover the data after a format, so long as it hasn't been overwritten.
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