Is it safe to cancel diskpart format in progress?

Question

I am currently formatting my external 1863 GiB HDD, because I had found out there were many bad sectors, however the numbers of the cylinders where the bad sectors are located change everytime I run a test, no filesystem corruptions were found, no corrupt files, and when I just run the tests merely a week ago, the disk was fine. During last week nothing can physically harm my disk happened. I think this is possibly logical bad sector or failure in the USB convertor chip. I will replace the disk if there are physical bad sectors.

I have run these commands in elevated cmd:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs

And the formatting takes forever... It takes several minutes to climb 1%, currently 12 percent completed

But I had read somewhere I can use clean all in diskpart to zero fill a disk, this will likely fix logical bad sectors, and I want to do that now, but the formatting is currently in progress, so will it harm my HDD if I ctrl+c the format progress?

Answer 1

It won't harm anything, but you have to realize that a "Clean all" will take almost just as long. (Both a full format and a clean all need to overwrite the entire disk. That is always going to take a while on large disk.)

Anyway... If you have random bad blocks on an external disk it is either the disk itself or the USB enclosure that is faulty.
Doing a full format or "clean all" through that same enclosure doesn't prove/solve anything if the enclosure is at fault. You can't trust it to do it right.
Also: Disk-tests and/or SMART data are often unreliable if done via USB as the controller chip inside the enclosure may manipulate the tests.

The only way to be sure if the disk itself is good is to take it out of the enclosure and connect it directly with SATA to the motherboard, or put it in another (known to be good) enclosure and format it there.