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How Do I Low-Level Format A SATA or ATA (IDE) Hard Drive
How Do I Low-Level Format A SATA or ATA (IDE) Hard Drive
2/21/2014
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What does "low level format" a SATA or ATA (IDE) drive mean?
Actually the term "low level" is a bit of a misnomer. The low-level process first used years ago in MFM hard drives bears little resemblance to what we now call a "low-level format" for today's SATA and ATA (IDE) drives. The only safe method of initializing all the data on a Seagate device is the zero fill erase option in SeaTools for DOS. This is a simple process of writing all zeros (0's) to the entire hard disk drive.
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Erase Track ZERO: Erases just the first 63 sectors on the drive which takes less than a second to
complete. This procedure removes the Master Boot Record (MBR) and Partition Table. This will cause the drive to look "empty" to a new installation of the operating system.
Timed Erase: Erases sectors for various time limits up to 5 minutes. These options will overwrite the
sectors at the beginning of the drive where the majority of the static operating system files reside.
Full Erase: Erases every data sector on the drive and takes a long time to complete. This procedure can
easily take several hours to complete. The advantage of this option is to discover and reallocate any defective (hard to read) sectors to good spares. This option comes closest in concept to the original idea of a low level format. When the process completes, reboot the system from the operating system install CD and follow the instructions to prepare (partition and format) the drive and install the operating system.
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/203931en
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2/21/2014
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