Solved Formating 3tb drive..diskpart clean or clean all

[darksoulvv]

I am having to format a 3tb drive that I am installing Windows 7 on and I need to know do I need to do clean all or just clean in diskpart? What happened is I did not know about the GPT (first time dealing with a drive over 2tb) and I just went through the motions like you do with installing. Well it didnt partition right and I only had 2 tb showing. So, I started using Seagates tools but found those cumbersome. So I am using Diskpart now. Will clean take it back to zeros and ones so I can take advantage of the 3tb or do I have to use clean all.

Thanks for the help!

Donna

 

[Slartybart]

Clean will wipe the first 100MB and last 100MB of the drive
Clean all wipes the entire drive - in most cases it is overkill.

All you need is clean - but be careful you've selected the correct drive.

Good luck

 

[theog]

1) CLEAN is OK, no need to use CLEAN ALL.

2) To use a 3tb HDD as a boot OS drive you need to install on a motherboard with a UEFI/BIOS firmware.

 

[darksoulvv]

Well there is only the one drive so thats not a problem. So clean will allow me to make it a GPT drive and then be able to use the entire 3tb (I know there will be 3 partitions when installing). The MB is already set to UEFI so thats not a problem either.

 

[whs]

Clean All would take a VERY long time for a drive that size. And all it does in addition to a simple Clean is to write zeros over the whole disk.

Btw: that's why you never use a Clean All for SSDs.

 

[darksoulvv]

Gotcha....dont have SSDs yet but one day soon. Ok, well I am going to do that then. Thanks for all your help!!! I may be back with questions but I will start a new thread if need be,

Thanks again everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!