A used but fairly new 40Gb Western Digital drive is taking around 30-35 secs
to format EACH PERCENT, in other words, almost 55 minutes to format the
whole drive.

The system is about 18 months old, with a 1.4 Ghz Athlon, Shuttle AK31 mobo
and 256 Mb DDR ram.

The format is being done in DOS using format.com from a W98SE system.  I
used fdisk to set the drive up with 2x 20Mb partitions.  C partition was
formatted with the /s switch, though I don't think that's a factor - each
partition is equally slow to format.

The system came to me with troubles - I'm wondering if this slow formatting
is indicative of anything.

Ideas would be appreciated.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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