I have installed RH 7.3 on 60 G without "format" during partition...

I have installed RH 7.3 on 60 G without "format" during partition...


everything seems to be working, I feel something may go wrong because , the HD is not "format".


please comment!

What do you mean by it didn't format?

If your system is up and running then the install process 'HAD' to format the disk with a filesystem, otherwise it wouldn't work.

the motherboard is tyan SMP ( but I only have one 1900+ AMD althon).

I did not check those box for "complete format the harddisk".


60 G takes only 35 min to be "FORMAT???? not sure if it really format or mot" and " installed software".

Did you have Linux on it before? The disk has to be formatted with a filesystem linux supports if it's up and running. If everything is working then why worry about it?

band new 60G HD.

If it's a brand new HDD and you are running Linux right now then the install process formatted the partitions.....otherwise you wouldn't be in Linux. I don't see what the problem is.

Damon's right. If you have a Linux install, and you can access it, then the disk was formatted. If the disk wasn't formatted, you wouldn't be able to use the installation. Period. There'd be no filesystem, just a bunch of disorganized, meaningless data spread all willy-nilly across the disk.

When I installed RH8 it only took a few minutes for it to format a 40G hard disk (constrast that with Windows XP which took nearly 20 minutes to format the 20G hard disk it now sleeps on...). The majority of the installation process involves moving the data from the CD(s) to the disk, not formatting the disk.

It usually takes a few hours to install 40 G / 20 G myself with relative slow machine 750 Mhz or 900 Mhz AMD.


I still won't believe it can complete that fast. The motherboard has only 512 DDR rams.

.... ?

Feel free to reformat it yourself and re-install the distro if it will make you feel better, but Damon and I are telling you flat out:

If you are using Linux, you have a Linux filesystem, which means the disk is formatted. I don't even think you could run a Linux distro on a partially formatted partition. Either the boot loader or init() would almost certainly blow up before the system finished booting.

I find it relatively hard to believe that it would take a few hours to format a disk. I can have a Red Hat 8.0 system installed, configured, and running on a recompiled kernel in well under 2 hours. For comparison, my hardware is:

P3 866Mhz - 133 Mhz FSB
512MB 133 SDRAM CL2
40GB / 7200 RPM HDD

tiny12, you should gather some more experience before you make assumptions like that.
if everything is working and it´s also fast, it´s linux! just don´t worry!

for instance, even a 486 can do a full format a 120 GB harddisk in few seconds, if you have a caching RAID controller. (i did this on a P1-133)

for "normal formatting" (also without RAID), it is only necessary to overwrite the first 1024 (not sure, maybe only 512) bytes of the harddisk.
windows is just crap! on formatting, it does test the whole harddisk for bad sectors. but since about 1995, all hard disks have built-in compensation for this problem ...

Guys, I think he is thinking "low level format" = "format", which isn't really the case.

tiny12, you don't have to format your drives (in the way that you seem to be thinking of formatting) to have things installed on them. You simply need to set up partitions and create filesystems on them. Any of the crap data that sits in the filesystems will be overwritten as needed.

You've been using Windows way too long my friend. It only took a few minutes to format all of my partitions on my PIII 550 w/ 320 MB RAM, 70 GB HDD and the complete install took under an hour. Don't use Windows as a benchmark on how things are done in the Linux world.

I do not worry now. I just to say that someone "counter check" what I have done.

Well, in the past it really takes hours to do such things.

Thanks everybody.