Re: How do you LOW FORMAT a hard drive

["Richard E. Hawkins" <hawk@hawkins.cba.uni.edu>]

Guilherme grunted,

> > But you shouldn't ever low level format a hard drive.  It isn't necessary
> > any more since the 80's.

> More that that, it's REALLY dangerous to do so in new IDE drives (something to do
> with geometry parameters, if I'm not mistaken)...

I have an old one I'd like to try it on, but the bios doesn't do it.  I 
stuck it in another machine briefly, and now it absolutely refuses to 
work as a primary (but is just fine as a slave).  It's an old caviar 
540 for the kids' machine.  Right now they have my machine, because 
that machine can't boot from the slave (or even use it without a 
primary present), nor can it recognize more than 1024 cylinders (or use 
the alternate modes).  So it sees my 8g drive as a 540 or so :(  I 
noticed the box on a new 20G at sam's club yesterday claimed it had 
software to get around old bios's, but I'm not willing to pay $250 just 
to get an old 486 running (the kids' stuff is almost all windows, so I 
have to deal with bios problems :(

rick


> Now, how would I LOW FORMAT a floppy disk???

That should happen on a regular formatk, shouldn't it?  (the current command is "superformat")
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