Low Level formatting for a western digital drive?

[caldawghan77]

Hi, I was wondering how I would perform a low level format on a western digital drive. I couldnt find a utility to do it on their website. Thanx for your help beforehand.

Calvin

 

[RU482]

Oooo, can't remember what it's called, but it should be the big diagnotic tool that is available for download on their site, or use the floppy that came with the drive (assuming you have it)

 

[Morph]

It's called Data Lifeguard Tools. If you bought a retail drive you should have gotten the floppy. Otherwise you'll have to download it from their site but you should know 2 things about it:

1) You can't create the floppy in NT/2000/XP, it must be created in Windows 95/98/ME.
2) It doesn't work on NTFS -formatted drives.

So basically their software sucks if you're running 2000/XP. The tools from Maxtor called Powermax are much better and I've used it before to low-level format a WD drive successfully.

 

[spanky]

get a util called data lifeguard.

 

[yellowperil]

I've used the WD software to zero-fill my WD 60GB without any problems. The disk was created in WinXP and all my partitions are NTFS. All you need is the Diagnostic utility from this page.

The WD utility took much longer to zero-fill than the other brands I've owned (Maxtor - MaxBlast and IBM - Disk Fitness Test). It was estimating around 4 hours but I stopped it early (I only needed the boot sector overwritten).

 

[Slatz]

East Tec Format Secure is a great proggy too, not sure if they have updated it yet to support NTFS but I would think they have.

 

[Morph]

Originally posted by: yellowperil
I've used the WD software to zero-fill my WD 60GB without any problems. The disk was created in WinXP and all my partitions are NTFS. All you need is the Diagnostic utility from this page.

This is what it says in the description for Data Lifeguard v2.8:
Note:
The Data Lifeguard Tools diagnostic utility can be used to test a drive that has Windows NT, 2000, or XP installed on it. However, you are unable to create the Data Lifeguard Tools disk from a system running Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP.

I tried it and was unable to create the disk in XP, I get an error when it tries to write to the floppy. So I'd be interested in hearing how you managed to create this disk in XP, if you are indeed talking about the same software.

 

[yellowperil]

Morph - I think you were using the Drive Lifeguard which makes its own boot disk and doesn't work in XP. Underneath the Lifeguard link are the individual components, download only the Diagnostic utility. Then create an MS-DOS boot disk in Windows and copy the contents of the Diagnostic .zip file onto it.

 

[Morph]

Ah, I didn't see that... thanks.