Re: Low level formatting - [was Re: slow (s-l-o-w) install (TRY)]

[Phil Clyde <pclyde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Tim.....
If you had a HD that has a MS product installed on it...
Note that when doing a lowlevel that you get addtional space?
and that the BLOCK sizes are different...also NOT on modern Drives
that you need to reset the MBR, the bios on you machine BY JUMPER
and resize the Hard drive....all of a sudden you get HD space back??
SAFE lowlevel is availaible for most drives on MFG websites...did arround
WD, Seagate, and SCSI drives seem to have no problem with doing this
I run a Web host service and a small leased co-location server opperation
and do this on a regular basis
Phil


Tim wrote:

On Sun, 2008-02-17 at 10:35 -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
  

I can remember people killing the early IDE drives by low-level 
formatting. The tools for low-level formatting MFM/RLL drives would 
mess up the IDE drives. With later drives, they would ignore the 
low-level formatting attempts. 
    

Somewhere in the junk collection I have an old motherboard with a
surface mounted 386 CPU on it, 4 megs of RAM, and 16 MHz of
lightning-fast processing power!  ;-)

Its BIOS has an option to low level format the IDE drive.  I tried it
out on a knackered hard drive, and it did format that drive (in as much
as data was erased, the drive was blanked).  After that, I did a high
level format, installed something to it, and it did work (so it didn't
kill the drive).

Though, I'd recommend against anyone low level formatting drives for the
same reasons you outline.  It's a well known path to self destruction.
My little test was with junk that didn't need keeping.