Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.hardware
Date: 2001-07-29 12:14:54 PST

>>is there a soft under linux that allows to low level format a disk ?
>Do you mean like 'way back in the old days where you formatted the
>actual sectors and interleave?  My understanding (possibly incorrect)
>is that you can't do that with modern hard drives.

You do a low-level format on a floppy disk with "fdformat" or "superformat". Modern hard disks *can* have their sector headers, interleave factors, cylinder skew, and all that adjusted, but you have to get special software from the drive manufacturer, and the software generally is specific to a particular model of drive. This stuff must be put on floppy for obvious reasons, and either has its own miniature homebrew OS or uses DOS.

If you have a hard disk that's spitting out unrecoverable errors that have to do with bad blocks, you can buy some time by moving all the data you want to save somewhere else, running "badblocks" on the partition, then running "badblocks -o /tmp/somewhere" on the partition, then doing "mke2fs -l /tmp/somewhere" on the partition. This is a *temporary* solution; when a disk starts dying, it just gets worse and worse.

Matt G

> yes, i meant old fashioned bios format
> i heard that it's the only way to get rid of bad clusters
> and i've got an old disk (seagate 1.2GB) with a lot of them
> so i'm looking for something to erase all and low level format it, but
> nothing works correctly !!!! under windows i mean .... ;-)