Windows 7: Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

It's blinking like when it was with the interrupted clean all. And yeah the "Current Sector" is increasing.

I guess interrupting the previous clean didn't damage anything right? Because I think the command window actually had a blinking "_", I just interpreted it wrong. The HDD was already empty and all.

Just don't understand where those 118MB after formating the unallocated space came from.

Interrupting it would usually just lead to having to format, clean, or clean all the drive again before being able to use it.

I would recommend to let this one finish to make it unallocated space so that you will be able to do step 10 afterwards, and not have to start over again.

It takes 14 hours to complete the clean all command on my USB external of 1TB. I just want to register that.

I will also full format the disk and later here tell how long it takes.

It takes a long time but that looks too long. Are you using USB 1 by any chance?

That was the clean all as I said. Full format should be somewhat faster.
USB 2.0 - thanks for noting.

PS. Please check some earlier posts of someone waiting 11 hours. It's perfectly normal for USB externals. I wanted to register that for anyone like me afraid something is wrong...

PPS. Still before the full format, the clean all again strangely only lasted for 11 hours. Nothing was done between both (clean all) passes. Then the full format also took 11 hours.
A couple things about my earlier wrong assumption. Either Format and Diskpart, actually almost anything is under very strict bandwidth limits - all of us know it, about 20MB per second on USB 2.o; and not as much known the fact that the full format also writes zeros since Vista.
Any comment on the 3 hours difference between both clean all passes is much appreciated.

Hey guys, the diskpart "clean all" command used to zero everything out within 3hours of my normal WD Black 1TB. But after the last clean install which is half a year ago, the "clean all" command took more than 10hours.

I've used:
Chkdsk /f/r/v for the whole drive, sfc /scannow and even WD HD Diagnostic tools.

Chkdsk found some bad sectors and fixed it, SFC found nothing, & during a month ago, I used WD HD Diag and found some errors in my hard disk. Apparently, it showed me an error and I looked it up on the net & I found the only way to fix it was to RMA it. But I lost my receipt & not sure about it whether I can RMA it without the receipt though. ):

Is it possible to fix the drive without RMA-ing it? Is it possible that the failing hard disk would be the issue for the slow "clean all" diskpart command?

Thanks for your time.

Hello 0770,

The time it takes to complete a "Clean all" command could vary depending on many different factors that each of those could also vary each time you run the command. For example, varying bandwidth, cpu usage, memory usage, drive errors (ex: bad sectors), how the drive is connected (SATA, USB 2.0, USB 1.0, eSATA) etc......


It's almost impossible to predict an exact time unitl completion due to this, but at least you have an average time now.

Hope this helps some.

Hello Xplicit,

Yes, a failing HDD would slow it down quite a bit. In fact running a "Clean all" command on a failing HDD could cause the HDD to completely fail faster due to the high activity on the HDD the command uses.

As for your receipt, if you purchased the HDD from a online retailer, then you might be able to go back to that online retailer, log in, view your order history, and hopefully find and print out a copy of the order's invoice as a receipt.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks for your fast reply, Shawn.
Is there any possible ways to fix the drive instead of the last resort to RMA it?

Xplicit,

Not for hardware failure. The only way to truly fix it is to replace it.

If you keep on using it, it's just going to be a gamble on when it's going to fail and take out the data on it as well.

I would strongly recommend to RMA it while it's still under warranty. Otherwise, you risk having to pay for a new one out of your own pocket when it dies.