Low Level Format... IDEs..

Vegito

Diamond Member
Oct 16, 1999
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Long time ago, when IDE first came out, you can't low level format it. ie. the format in BIOS. What company besides WDC has a low-level format utility.

Does low level format work for current new generation of HDs ?

Also can you low level format it in BIOS and and use their utility.

Does low-level mark out bad sectors or blocks and etc.. thanks
 

Mark R

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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The old definition of 'low-level format' meant completely rewriting the track and sector markings on the disc. The drive heads moved in fixed steps, and after time or a lot of use, the step positions of the heads may drift away from the magnetic markings.

For about 10 years, this this type of format has been impossible; the tracks and sectors are so closely packed that the only way to seek at all is to use the track/sector markings as a guide. Drives which cannot be formatted in this way ignore the BIOS format command.

Because of this, 'low-level format' has now come to mean something different: it now means deleting information about any partitions and any OS specific information, so that the drive appears totally blank to your OS.

All drive manufacturers offer utilities that do this, although they aren't usually called 'Low-level format', instead they are often called 'Wipe' or 'ZeroFill' or something similar.

LLF will delete all OS specific data on your drive - this includes the Windows/DOS bad sector list. Normally, Windows/DOS will preserve this list when you format, so as to protect your data from being stored in bad sectors. The format itself does nothing to the actual sectors themselves, if they really are bad, then they stay bad - except that now, Windows/DOS doesn't know about them, and will happily save your files in them.
 

Vegito

Diamond Member
Oct 16, 1999
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so I was right, the low level format I wanted can't be done except for manufactures.. darn..
 

Aboroth

Senior member
Feb 16, 2000
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Well, there are two ways a sector can be bad. It can either be physically damaged or have corrupt information that some disk utility couldn't read so it just marked the sector bad. If the sector is bad just because of corrupt information then a low level format will "fix" it.
 

obeseotron

Golden Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Every HD maker puts one out under one name or another. Maxdiag isn't a dedicated llf app, but it will do it.