Mark Allums wrote:
Bob McGowan wrote:I have Maxtor IDE drives and Maxtor makes (or made, I got this some time ago) a DOS based utility to do low level formats. Your disk vendor probably has something similar available.The Maxtor utilities will prep a drive, for those who can't be bothered to use the native utilities for an OS, but I quite doubt that an IDE was truly low-level formatted by it. The drive platters of modern drives are low-level formatted before they are even assembled into a working hard disk. They contain "embedded servo" information, which can't be written by the read/write heads even if one wanted to. Attempting to low-level format an IDE drive would only succeed in permanently destroying the drive.
I am not a hardware expert, so I have to admit to using the terms mentioned in the documentation or used by others in some way. This usage may in fact be incorrect, for all I know.
However, there are others who speak about low level formatting of Maxtor IDE drives:
http://www.ameriwebs.net/groupworks/george/maxtor.htmBeyond this, since Maxtor is now part of Seagate, the setup of the web page is different and a quick search did not bring up anything relating to this.
I was not able (yet) to find the original download I did, only the exe file on a floppy. When I find the related docs, I will post that.
-- Bob McGowan Symantec, Inc.
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