Low Level Formatting question(s)

[Hearie]

Greetings,
Have quite a few older HDD's sitting around and I would like to spend a day testing them out. I know a few of them have Invalid Partition Table errors. What I am looking for is a utility that will low level format any HDD(reguardless of brand). Is this feasible? Or do I need each manufacturers own LLF tool. Thnx

Bryan

[Billforce]

There are many low level format programs available. Many of the older motherboards had the option incorporated in their bios setups. They will format most anything (other than ex-wives and mother-in-laws).:D

[Hearie]

From what I have been reading, it's probaly prudent to use the formatting tools that are brand specific.(ie. use SeaGate utilities for Seagate drives and WD for WD drives and so on).

On another note, if anyone can get me that program BillForce mentioned(X-Formatter?) please lemme know as I am in DIRE need!!!:x

Bryan

[Bovon]

I am not aquanted with X-formatter, but IBM had one called wipe.com that is run from dos, and completely re writes the drive with 1s and 0s..but the link at IBM no longer works, and I couldn't track it down.

Most all hard drive manufacturers have some kind of low level formatting utility...and I would assume they will work ok on somebody elses drive...but I am not positive.

I found the following utility that may be what you want.

http://www.lurkhere.com/~nicefiles/index.html
WIPE OUT : as the name implies, this utility will absolutely WIPE your hard drive. For those times when an industrial strength cleaner is needed to remove any pesky files Fdisk may have left behind. A readme file is included in the zip file. WARNING...WIPE OUT will remove ALL data from the Hard Drive.

[sm8000]

If you can find wipe.com it will zero-fill up to 8GB. IBM's zap.exe is a similar tool that will do only the first 128 sectors, in order to clear the boot record, partition table, and FATs 1 and 2. If you send a PM to BipolarBill here I'm sure he could help you find them.

[Billforce]

Many of my original setup cdroms that come with various motherboards have a low level format utility on the cd.

[Billforce]

I use KILLPART to completely kill all partitions and wipe the drive clean before I fdisk and reformat the drive.

Available for free download on the net.

[rangeral]

WIPE is included with the dft utility which is over at hitachi now

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

[Strawbs]

If you have at least one Maxtor drive installed on the system, you can prep up to three other drives with MaxBlast 3 (http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm), It works with my Maxtor\Samsung combination.

:t