<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> 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: <blockquote cite="mid:1203271662.3387.4.camel@suspishus.lan.cameratim.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Sun, 2008-02-17 at 10:35 -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">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. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> 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. </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>