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Author Topic: Low Level format time  (Read 3569 times)

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Offline Zac67

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Re: Low Level format time
« on: May 10, 2008, 05:13:14 PM »
It's impossible to low level format modern drives. You probably mean zeroing all sectors.
Some IDE drives are stupid enough to destroy their servo information and/or firmware on an LLF attempt - this will damage them beyond repair.

Writing 4 GB at 1MB/s (low estimate) takes 4000 seconds - a bit more than an hour. I don't think that your attempt is still progressing. I'd abort it and check if the drive still works.
 

Offline Zac67

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Re: Low Level format time
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2008, 07:19:58 PM »
Yes. Wikipedia: HDD Low Level Formatting

Note that you can't possibly LLF a SCSI HDD - there's no SCSI command to do it.
 

Offline Zac67

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Re: Low Level format time
« Reply #2 on: May 11, 2008, 09:40:55 AM »
Bad sectors remapping is automagically done by the drive on writing a bad sector (thus zeroing the whole drive helps getting rid of them). You can also use any sector level disk editor to rewrite the sectors.

The bad sectors table is completely internal to the drive and can be read through the SCSI config pages.

If the drive developed more than a few bad sectors over a shorter period, you better bin the unit as it is likely to fail/lose more data.