Me said:
That's an old myth. Not only is it possible, it's a very good thing
to do if you're reusing a hard drive from elsewhere. Our beleagured
friend should probably LLF the drive, then worry if that doesn't work.
For old ST-506/ST-412 (MFM/RLL) drives, you had a separate controller so
it was possible to access the drive directly (i.e., past the
controller). For IDE (Integrated Device Electronics) drives, the
controller is built into the circuit board on the hard drive. The card
for SCSI is a host adapter, not a controller, since SCSI drives also
have their controller circuitry on the hard drive. You still have a
controller between you and the program that you execute so you can only
perform actions on the hard drive for the functions available by the
controller. You do not have the raw access to the hard drive that the
drive manufacturer has, but then *you* never did as there was always a
controller between your program and the drive. Because consumer-grade
fixed disks were low quality, the old controllers let you set parameters
when exercising the raw format of a hard drive that you really shouldn't
touch. This was Spinrite's claim to fame when they could massage a
failing disk back to health or move data around to somewhere that the
retentivity was better or to change settings that I don't even remember
regarding how the data is actually physically laid down on the platters.
You don't get that anymore with IDE or SCSI drives. You no longer can
redefine the physical geometry used in defining where the tracks and
sectors are defined on the platters. The built-in controllers cannot
thoroughly test a drive to determine its physical geometry for laying
out tracks and sectors; it can check for how rereads there are needed
for a sector but it cannot measure retentivity to determine if that
sector is "soft". You only get to zero-fill them now (actually you
should massage them through several patterns of which the last one is a
zero-bit pattern). Rather than rely on me or what others think they
remember, see:
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/ata_llfmt_what.html
http://freepctech.com/pc/001/007.shtml
http://www.bluewizardusa.com/tut/hardware/lowlevelformat.html
What used to be a low-level format is not what you do now for a
low-level format. Fact is, low-level format as used now is a misnomer.
What "our beleagured friend" should do is use the diagnostic utility
provided by the manufacture of his hard drive. He/she should have also
mentioned what brand and model of hard drive and for what OS and version
he was trying to use its format command.
