From: rich@example.invalid   
      
   vjp2.at@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com wrote:   
   > I tried to reformat with GParted, but it was supsiciously fast.   
      
   GParted edits partition tables, it does not "format" -- so you were not   
   "reformatting" anything.   
      
   > Formatting should take forever, right?   
      
   Not since floppy disks disappeared and IDE hard drives appeared.  Any   
   hard drive of IDE interface or newer is pre-formatted from the factory   
   and you can not "reformat" it at all.   
      
   What you are calling "formatting" is actually creating a partition   
   and initializing a filesystem -- but is not "formatting" (not as   
   "formatting" meant from the days of floppy disks).   
      
   And creating a partition is fast, involving the writing of only a few   
   sectors on the drive.   
      
   Creating a filesystem is also fast (involving simply writing the   
   filesystems management data onto the drive) and so depending on which   
   filesystem you wrote (if you did, GParted does not create filesystems)   
   that process could be very fast as well.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)