Does cancelling a drive format partway through corrupt/damage anything?

[Bleedingyamato]

My friend was trying to format an external HDD but accidentally selected an internal HDD (thankfully there was nothing on it) and selected a full format. (unchecked the quick format box) 

 

It got partway through before she realized it was the wrong drive and she pressed the cancel button on the format window.  

 

 

Did doing that partial format before canceling potentially mess up the drive in some way?

 

 

 

I'm wondering if I should have her do a new format and let it finish just to be safe.  

[djboy6480]

was it quick-format?

[Emillionaire]

If there was nothing on it, then i guess you can just format the drive and start over.
If there was data on it, then it would properly be corrupted.
I'm no expert though. 

[AkiraDaarkst]

3 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

My friend was trying to format an external HDD but accidentally selected an internal HDD (thankfully there was nothing on it) and selected a full format. (unchecked the quick format box) 

 

It got partway through before she realized it was the wrong drive and she pressed the cancel button on the format window.  

 

 

Did doing that partial format before canceling potentially mess up the drive in some way?

 

 

 

I'm wondering if I should have her do a new format and let it finish just to be safe.  

If there was nothing on the drive originally, it's fine. If there was any data stored, then potentially that data is lost and if it's important she should use a data recovery software to see if anything can be recovered.

 

But it shouldn't do any physical damage to the drive and she can go ahead do a quick format just to format the drive completely.

[Enderman]

9 minutes ago, djboy6480 said:

was it quick-format?

" (unchecked the quick format box) "

[djboy6480]

so if it was not a quickformat the data could be lost I dont think you can restore all Data.

[djboy6480]

if you have luck you find a tool that can restore whats left behind.

[Bleedingyamato]

10 minutes ago, AkiraDaarkst said:

If there was nothing on the drive originally, it's fine. If there was any data stored, then potentially that data is lost and if it's important she should use a data recovery software to see if anything can be recovered.

 

But it shouldn't do any physical damage to the drive and she can go ahead do a quick format just to format the drive completely.

I'm not worried about physical damage.

 

It doesn't show normally in "This PC" so I think at least something got messed up like maybe the drive space got unallocated.  

 

I'll try reformatting it again.  Otherwise I'll try looking at it in disk manager.  

[AkiraDaarkst]

21 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

I'm not worried about physical damage.

 

It doesn't show normally in "This PC" so I think at least something got messed up like maybe the drive space got unallocated.  

 

I'll try reformatting it again.  Otherwise I'll try looking at it in disk manager.  

Computer management, Disk Management or CMD, DiskPart.  The disk probably needs to have formatting completed and drive letter assigned.

 

Better to do a command line diskpart.

Open CMD

enter "diskpart" without the quotes

then when diskpart opens, type in "list disk"

and then next enter "clean disk #" without quotes and replacing the # with the disk number (going from 0 to whatever number of disks you have, make sure to clean all of them.