Quote:
Originally posted by mmilano
yes, it is something i need to do. i'm doing some product testing for a proprietary product, and this drive we are using won't take a format from this prototype after it's been formatted on windows.
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If you already have Windows running on it properly, then you do not need a low-level format. A low-level format is for repairing
physical damage to the disk. If you perform a surface scan in Windows scandisk and it says certain sectors are damaged, then a low-level format
may fix it. If a surface scan says everything checks out ok, then you should definately not do a low-level format as it's dangerous like flashing the Bios.
You probably want to do what bdl suggests. It's what I consider a mid-level format. In case you can't put another hard drive in the machine with Linux on it, there are several varients of it that run on floppy disks including Trinux (which I've tried myself, though the spelling may not be right). You simply download floppy images and copy them (with dd in unix or rawrite in Windows) and you're ready to go. It's the only way I can think to do it since Windows doesn't have a program for writing directly to the disk. (I once wrote a program myself in assembler that did it, but I lost that program about a year ago.)