Oh, and I probably should add that I have never in my whole life low-level-formatted a hard disk. I've taken disks from PCs running both Windows and Linux, put them directly in my A1200, partitioned them and then just quick formatted them. I have never had any trouble whatsoever.
I lowlevelformatted my very first own hard disk when I was still a kid.. (I had done it on PCs with ESDI controllers before, but that's different - you can change some parameters (like the capacity!) on ESDI drives yourself by re-lowlevelformatting them. NOT APPLICABLE TO SCSI/IDE, NO USE LOWLEVELFORMATTING THEM, EVER)
This time it took so very long that I got bored and switched off the machine.. Big mistake! Dead machine, the HD reported write errors every time I tried to do anything to it. I called all around Finland for support for my problem.. In the end I found out that if the drive starts the LLF, it must be completed before you can use it again.
Luckily my drive was one of those that go into a "dumb mode" if the LLF is interrupted.. The only command it accepts is LLF, so I restarted the LLF, did something else while it formatted (took something like four hours :-D) and the drive worked again. Quite a shock for a kid who almost thought he ruined some expensive HW.. I was lucky, many others haven't been. :-(
Please note, that some drives accept the LLF command, but don't actually do anything - they complete immediately. Guess why? - You are correct, it's because you are not supposed to do it yourself and the vendors got tired of replacing drives the users botched up.
Anyway, this is some empiric experience that came from messing with LLF, it's not hearsay or rumour.
Bottom line: DON'T LOWLEVELFORMAT ANY MODERN SCSI or IDE HARD DRIVE. (also don't mix setting up partitions with LLF, it's as far from LLF as Pluto is from the Sun.)
[Edit: I was a little harsh - there are situations when a LLF is good, so it's actually not "never" but "99,999% of the time never" .. I just want to stress the fact that you shouldn't do it, because it is potentially dangerous, 99.999% of the time totally unnecessary and if you have a power outage or your cat presses reset or something, you might end up with an expensive paperweight!]
