How Do You Do a Low Level Format?

Ph33zy

Senior member
Mar 5, 2000
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I have a WD 40giger thats crapping out on me.. and im gonna try a low level format as a last resort... is there a program that will do it? Can i do it from windows xp? I tried using the Western Digital Boot disk but it says "Not recognized as a Western Digital Hard Drive" which is ironic (it used to work, i dont know what happened). Can anyone help... thanks in advance
 

Mark R

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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A LLF does little more than a normal format - all it does is it makes Windows 'forget' about bad sectors - which is asking for trouble because it means files will be saved into the bad sectors and get lost.

Drives fail because of hardware failure - software can't fix that. If the drive is so badly damaged that the diagnostic software won't even initialize....
 

AU Tiger

Diamond Member
Dec 26, 1999
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IBM has a program called WIPE that I believe performs a low level format.

Edit: Added link. Wipe works on any manufacturer's drives.
 

John

Moderator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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You do not LLF modern drives, you write zeros to them.
 

hmsrolst

Diamond Member
Mar 18, 2001
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You asked about doing this from XP, which can't be done. Zero-filling your drive does just that, so you need to save anything you need, because everything, including your OS, will be gone.
 

Ph33zy

Senior member
Mar 5, 2000
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what if my harddrive is a secondary hardrive? right now theres no data on the drive right now..
 

hmsrolst

Diamond Member
Mar 18, 2001
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Good point. All the utilities I've used have run from floppies, but I don't know if that has to be the case.
 

mandrake88

Member
Apr 22, 2000
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make it easy on yourself, go to the seagate or ibm website and down load their version of disk manager.
it MAY work with WD, altho i am not sure. WD site might have it too, give it a shot. dm will simplify low level
formatting your drive. good luck......
 

yellowperil

Diamond Member
Jan 17, 2000
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Download Diagnostic at the Western Digital site (under Data Lifeguard), and copy the contents to an MS-DOS boot disk. I ran this utility several days ago on my WD 60GB HD and it did the trick. However, I have also owned IBM and Maxtor HDs, and forr some reason the zero-fill utility supplied by WD is a lot slower than the Drive Fitness Test and MaxBlast software. I could zero-fill the other drives in around 45 mins but the WD was estimating almost 5 hours before I ended it early (I only needed the boot sector overwritten anyway).
 

FishTankX

Platinum Member
Oct 6, 2001
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Yellowperil:My 40 gig baracuda ATAIV took about 5 hours to Zerofill.. it'snormal..

Then it took another 5 hours to repartition! :Q:Q:Q
 

RalfHutter

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Dec 29, 2000
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I've used Maxtors' "Powermax" HDD utility to "LLF" all different brands of HDDs. It's faster tham the IBM utility and it's doing the same thing (writing "zeros").Get it here. Read the text notes on that page. What you need to use is called "Write Disk Pack (low level format)". As per the instructions on the page, you will have to boot using a regular Win98 boot disk to run this. Follow the directions and you'll be OK.

You can also do this in Windows since you're working on a drive other than your boot drive. Norton has something in their Utilities Suite called "Wipe Info" that does zero fills. I use a utility called "BCwipe". It also overwrites using zeros and works fine on XP.

These Windows-based wiping utilities at least give you the option of using your computer while you're formatting your drive.