I was burning a data disc on to a 50 GB BE-RW, and as usual did a MD5SUM of the disc twice afterwards, to assure that it read consistently (at least after being written).

To my surprise, I had one come up with different different MD5SUMs, so I figured I would format it again. Then I read about -format=full. So I figured, why not.

That was almost two days ago. It is still formatting.

Has anyone done a full format on a 25GB or 50GB drive, and remember how long it took?

addendum: used dvd+rw-format -format=full /dev/sr0


I expected it to take some time, perhaps four times the time to write data to the disc, but I didn't expect two days. The meager literature warned it it might take a while, so I'm not complaining, just curious.

I have never had any successful format take longer than 8 hours, and even that was a special case. ( 2.2Tof old SCSI 7k rpm disks).

That was a harddrive, correct?

I am talking about format times for a bluray removable media, if a complete format is done (unusual).