I have a used laptop with a 1Tb drive and am instaling Linux Mint and it has already taken 23 hours. Is this reaonable? I do not want to interrupt the process if this time is to be expected.

Thanks, Tom

What exactly. are you doing to the drive? Are you saying the Linux Mint install procedure is taking 23 hours or are you going through a anti-forensic wipe process using shred, deban/nuke, etc?

You do not need to wipe before installation, but you can do that if you think so.

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Yhanks foir your replies.

I have a used laptop with a former user's files and win 7 and I selected the first install option in Mint not to do a a partition but install on the dsisc and I understood that it does a wipe of the drive first, but no options of what level. Very new to any Linux versions!
Just wondereing it there was something wrong. The disc activity led flashes and the mouse shows activity. So it may just mean waiting.

hm. Probably nothing wrong, just wiping.... 1 TB will take a long time.

OP: When installing Linux on a new drive, the drive can be formatted. Are you saying that you chose to use the whole disk for the Mint install. and it is taking 23 hours? I don't use Mint so can't say what "install to entire" disk does, but I cannot imagine it does an anti-forensics wipe. Every Linux install I have ever done is simply a disk format, which does not take long, even on a TB.

When you set up new partitions on an old drive it will mark all sectors available for use.
Give it a new MBR if you like, but you should be able to just install any Linux/BSD onto any drive without the need to wipe the drive first.

Thanks

I think that my choice of ways to install Mint was: 'erase and install Linux Mint'.

Interesting - I aim not clear why it is taking 20+ hours. "Erase" to me is "format", but I have not installed Mint in years so can't say what is doing behind the scenes. The longest I have seen a Mint install take on hardware I have owned was maybe 10 or 15 minutes tops.

Last time I did a hard drive format with full verification was a much smaller desktop drive (perhaps 300-500 GB) in an external USB 2 enclosure. I had to leave it working overnight!
Since them, I only do quick format that is finished in a few seconds (e.g. with GParted). Laptop drives are usually less fast than desktop drives, so it doesn't seem too strange to take so long. Nevertheless I can't understand why Mind would go for such a long operation.

Erasing existing partitions and making new ones initialize file tables from 0, so there is no real need to fully erase the drive or the partition before. Furthermore, I'm afraid that this causes an unnecessary stress to the hard drive mechanics. If you can hear some light clicks from the laptop, this means that it still works.

We could tolerate such (not so long) operations in the past, with hard drives of some 100s of MB or a few GB. This could take 15-20 minutes, not really annoying. Nevertheless, nowadays drives don't need verify process with format, because they already contain spare sectors to remap bad sectors automatically as they detect them. A drive that reports bad sectors is already in bad condition, because all his spare sectors seem to be already used.

However, there is a case where wiping out a part of the disk space can be necessary, as one can find in the GParted forum: In some cases making new partitions and even a new partition table failed. It has been possible only after having a few MiB in the disk space start wiped to zero with the dd command. We don't know why, just it worked this manner.

Wonder if there is something wrong with the disk - as mentioned above, simply deleting the partitions and formatting new ones shouldn't take any time. Don't worry about interrupting the install - restarting it simply starts from the beginning.

I would stop it, boot the USB in "Test Linux" mode and delete all the partitions and format one large one over the entire disk, then mkfs.ext4 on it. That way you can see any errors. You could probably use gparted from the liveUSB to achieve the same prior to a full install.

Thanks all. I finally stopped the slow activity and began the installation now in progres.

If you try one more install and it fails, then you may have a bad install media. This could be a bad ISO, which you can verify it with md5 checksum. If you are installing via USB, could be issues with it, or it could be issues with your physical laptop. Mostly its the ISO or USB giving you issues.

If you download the media via a torrent link, it will verify the file for you. If you are putting it on a USB for install media, Rufus has a verification option I believe. That's what I use anyways if I create one from windows.

You didn't choose the option to check the drive for bad blocks, did you? That takes forever.

The install went well thanks.
I may start a new thred re Thunderbird