Low Level Format tools or commands in Linux.
 

Hello.
How can I Low Level Format a Drive ?

Tnx.

I do remember old IDE motherboards had low level format options, but that's history. Why you think you need low level format?

do not use unless you KNOW what this dose
change /dev/sd?? to the one you need

Wasn't "low level" and "high level" just a Windows way of putting things? I have forgotten a lot about this kind of thing but I seem to recall that formatting in the OS is just formatting and IDE or SCSI will take care of the details.

Back in the pre-LBA days, new drives required a low-level format which wrote all the sector preambles and headers. This was not a filesystem format, but in those days drives didn't have much firmware and were shipped totally blank from manufacturers. In the real old days there were physical notches on the drive spindle that provided sector clocking. Until you low-level formatted your disk you didn't have any available sectors to format for a filesystem.

For the last many years, the simple answer is you can't low-level format a drive, unless perhaps you work for the drive manufacturer and have access to special equipment.

I always thought of low level formatting as having the drive's firmware doing the formatting, instead of the OS's software.

I guess these days a low level format is wiping the entire disk block by block, and high level formatting is basically a quick format, or simply creating a new filesystem over the old one.