HDToolBox "Low Level Format" does not do this. It send a special SCSI command to the device, and this is always ignored or reported as an error by IDE/ATA drives.
Not really, it depends on the IDE drive. When I LLF'd my partitions years ago, they did not return an error. Okay, it was done in less than two seconds which meant it really wasn't don, but they appeared as normal drives on WB.
After I've partitioned my drives I LLF them, so that I know they have been named properly (rarely HDToolbox gave me a partition that I couldn't format properly - this was after NOT LLF'ing the drive. I redid the partitions in HDToolbox and LLF'd the drive, everything was fine after that).
I don't LLF my drives anymore, I have only got one FFS partition - my boot one - the rest are all SFS.
I only LLF my partitions as a cautionary measure (as explained above), then I format each partition properly after the reboot.
