low level formatt, and a high level formatt question

[aUt0eXebat]

I want to completely whipe everything off my HD, first im going to do a low level formatt... fdisking it. then I want to do a high level formatt, where it erases bit by bit right? How do I do this?

 

[bacillus]

you should be able to get the low level format utility from your hdd manufacturer's website!

 

[aUt0eXebat]

no i dont want to use one of those....

 

[medic]

Pick up..

BCWipe

Shell extender for W95/98/ME/NT/2000 that can be set to wipe files and free space to DoD specs or better with multiple passes.

 

[Modus]

What most people call "low level formatting" technically isn't. It just wipes every physical byte on the entire drive, destroying all logical and artificial structures (e.g. master boot record, partition tables, boot records, file allocation tables (FAT), data). This is sometimes necessary when a program has so corrupted the drive that FDISK refuses to repartition properly.

Low level formatting technically refers to a factory process called defect management, whereby the drive is scanned for the usual bad sectors that occur during production. Those sectors are mapped and recorded so that the drive never writes to them again. Currently, only IBM provides a true defect management utility for download, however you probably don't want to use it, since any newbad sectors on a warrantied drive is a sure sign it needs to be RMA'd.

The FORMAT command has, since at least 1995, not really wiped the drive. It simply wipes the FAT and then performs a cluster-by-cluster read/write test to pick up bad sectors. That's why it's relatively easy for a program like Lost & Found to recover from a botched FDISK and FORMAT. Actually, FORMAT /Q does exactly the same thing as FORMAT, only without the bad sector test. It's just that FORMAT does not allow the /Q switch on a fresh partition.

Modus