NTFS/Microsoft really sucks.

[Overdog]

Yes, and there may still be some utilities floating around out there that will attempt to do a true low level format. In the past, I've seen these utilities screw up the drive, but that was in the few years immeadiately following the release of IDE drives. I admit I haven't heard of any cases of this in recent years, however.

[alexander]

Oh, yeah, i have heard of drives being screwed up too, what i found is, well there are 3 standards to disk allocation, if you use the wrong one, might as well just order a new hard drive, generally i wouldn't recommend using a utility that did not come from the drive manufacturer... and i've had IDEs screw up, IDEs used to have to be low-leveled for a long time too, though the problems described in the original thread are more likely due to ntfs fragmentation then low-level format, generally, if that screws up, you drive is toast and you just can't use it...

[Boerseun]

Well, not going into technicalities or anything, but from a NTFS point of view (yes, it DOES blow), a 'format' simply deletes the Master File Table - the file that tells the OS the location of all other files on the drive. On a standard NTFS installation, 12.5% of the drive is dedicated to the MFT, and its the one part of the drive which cannot be defragmented. This space isn't reserved, though - it stays intact until you fill your drive past 87.5% - in which case additional MFT entries gets written to any available tracks, fragmenting the MFT to hell and gone. A simple 'format' then doesn't help - the MFT stays fragmented, because all you do then is to clear the "pointer" to the beginning of the MFT. That's all a standard "format" does, in fact. After a 'format', you'll have an empty disk with pieces of the MFT scattered all over. Fun and games, and REALLY BLOODY STUPID. But it saves time, I guess. That's also why NTFS claims to be able to "recover" lost data - the data was never gone to begin with; you just have to figure out where the files begin and end. Many data recovery applications does just that.

A "low-level" format on an NTFS drive not only clears the entry point to the MFT, it writes a zero to each and every point on the harddrive - regardless. There will be no reserved MFT fragments lying all over the drive. After zeroing the disk, the MFT is once again solid, and you slap yourself on the forehead and promise yourself you'll never fill your drive to capacity, ever, again.

But the technicalities of 'formatting' and 'low-level' formatting is going a little off-topic here. My gripe is that after the disk was zeroed, and NOTHING ELSE WAS DONE ON THE COMPUTER, another Microsoft product was installed. And after the installation, the drive was fragmented something crazy.

MS Flight Sim X takes around 15Gb on a drive. From install, I'd reckon that you'd see a continuous 15Gb stripe on the harddrive - apart from a few minor registry entries. I haven't even executed the game yet, NOTHING. It was just straight from install. And between Microshaft and NTFS, they decided to install the game in little segments all over my pristine, freshly-zeroed drive.

I fail to see how such data sloppiness can be intentional. But then again, considering that it was basically (for all practical purposes) a 15Gb file-copy plus a few registry entries, I battle to see how it could not be...

[alexander]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

A "low-level" format on an NTFS drive not only clears the entry point to the MFT

low-level format on any drive is what me and overdog have been discussing low-level is a low-level

If you mean a wipe, aka something that will overwrite all the data on the drive with randomness, and you will haev to create partitions, etc, from scratch again. You may mean that, but it's not a low-level format...

All file systems have an MFT, this is what tells the hard drive where to find data, just some filesystems manage it waaay better then others

drive is almost always fragmented. installation is nothing more then copying files from the cd, onto your hard drive, linking and relating them. and they do get moved more then once in the process of windows installation. Yes, there will be fragmentation after a windows install, fragmentation is ntfs/fat's first and middle name...

FAT = Fragmented Allocation Table
NTFS = New, Totally Fragmented Shit

MS Flight Sim X takes around 15Gb on a drive.

Please, buy and install X-plane, as a hypographer, you will enjoy it more.

Flight Sim has a static flying model, that gets determined by the sim, and prior. They can get away with a bad plane model, and static values, and call it a sim.

X-Plane has a dynamic flying model, it breaks the plane into pieces, about 2x2in in size, and then calculates the airflow around it, and by that, vector forces generated by that air, and that is how lift is calculated, and how your plane flies.

Oh did i mention it does that thousands of times a minute?

So this makes them have extremely accurate plane models (or else they wont fly), and this makes it possible to do things like, attempt to land a shuttle, because the flying model is dependent on height, which gives you either better or worse lift, and different flight characteristics, world in X-plane is modeled after the real earth too, so, when landing a shuttle, you will hit the upper layers of the atmosphere, which, if not entered at the right angle, will make you bounce off of them, then there is the chance that you will overcompensate for the bounce and enter at too high an angle, to burn up in the atmosphere.... oops, been there, done that

plus, like 85 gigs of scenery data, really add a nice twist to it, 25,737 airports, from the remotes of africa to nyc, etc. And it runs on every platform, Linux, Windows, Os X, once you have a license, you can install it on either of all of the platforms.... and its only $60 (price will be going up)

Did i mention up to date weather information, detailed 3d cockpits. Lastly, did i mention that big plane manufacturers allow their potential customers to download x-plane airplane models, generally for a little money, to see if they like the way that plane flies?

[C1ay]

In an effort to do things the hard way there may still be an option

I'm thinking you could zero the drive. Partition the drive making the first partition only big enough to install your flight sim. Leave the rest of the drive unpartitioned and unformatted. Format the partition and install the flight sim. Use ntfstools on a Linux Live CD to resize the partition to get back the rest of your drive or incrementally as you install software.

If you'd like I could probably dream up some more hoops to jump through

[alexander]

B, can you post screenshots of your disk fragmentation, i am not saying you dont know, but fragmentation, or defragmentation, and knowing how the data on NTFS is generally positioned, is a sort-of an art.