Restored to blank drive from Time Machine - couple odd things

[Schtibbie]

So I replaced my hard drive with a brand new bigger one, booted to the DVD of Snow Leopard with my Time Machine disk plugged in as well, and did the partition and then restore steps. No, I didn't have to install MacOS X first and then migrate. I restored right from backup. Mostly worked awesomely.

Couple oddities that maybe folks here have answers for:

• That first step (setting that 1 partition), which I think handled the formatting as well was SUPER fast. I expected it would have to take hours for a 320gig drive. Took minutes. Do drives no longer require low-level surface formatting?
• My desktop background was lost. No biggie - I re-found the picture and set it.
• I now have a "Private" folder visible in finder that didn't used to be there. It has underneath it the following folders: etc, tftpboot, tmp, var. What's this?

 

[Grannyville7989]

With regards to the formatting, I have noticed that Windows 7 no longer performs a low level format during the partitioning of the drive or installation of the OS. I assume it's because with drives getting bigger, people don't want to be sitting there for hours while waiting for their hard drive to format. I did a low level format on my 1.5TB hard drive and it took nearly 24 hours for the format to complete.

I'd say that 9 times out of 10, a quick format is fine enough just to get everything setup how you want on your drive. If you really want to do a more thorough job when formatting, the option is still there. Also, with the popularity of solid state drives, you'd want to avoid doing a low level format otherwise you'll be doing more harm than good.