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

[Tim]

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.

-- 
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 important to the thread.)

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