Low Level Format

[raksasas]

I have heard this term server times and I am have never done one. In the experiment I work in I deal with so many types of drives. Flash, IDE, SATA, etc. all diffrent makes, models, sizes. So how do I do a "low level format?"

[Vertigo Acid]

In practice they don't really exist any more. You can't "low-level format" a hard drive in the same sense as it used to be known.
You can still do a format that will remap bad sectors, but that's not really the same thing

[DougLite]

Back in the olden days (before my time even!), one could rewrite the cylinder, head, and sector markings on a drive in a so called "low level format." This is obsolete for a couple of reasons:

1. Drives don't use cylinder, head, and sector addressing anymore. They use logical block addressing, where each 512 byte sector is numbered linearly from 0 to however many sectors the drive has. Each track on the platter has a certain number of sectors, but it varies by location on the platter, zoning patterns, and other really arcane factors. Tracks near the outside of the platter have more sectors than tracks near the inside. The drives firmware translates any given sector's physical location to an LBA sector number that is presented to the BIOS and OS.

2. The sector markings on the platters are made with absurdly powerful magnets at the media factory, and can't be overwritten with anything the end user has access to even if s/he wanted to.