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.htm
Beyond 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.