low level formatting?

no1zhome · 04-12-2002, 05:19 PM

From what I understand, there is actually a lot of confusion over what is meant by low-level formatting.

"True" llf'ing involves the creation of intersector & intertrack gaps, etc., etc., which on modern ide drives can only be done at the factory.

Whereas the utilities that claim to llf a drive really reset the HD back to its default factory settings.

Ol' Winblows users couldn't delete non-DOS partitions with M$oft's version of fdisk (as it couldn't see them) so they had to resort to what they call low-level formatting to remove them.

(I also had a teacher who once told me that the only way to remove non-DOS partitions was to do a llf. I didn't argue.)

justiceisblind · 04-13-2002, 12:35 AM

I wasn't saying that you had to format as in the dos command format c:\ or what not. (I wasn't really sure what I was saying) But I think I was saying that if you create a partition using a program like fips or something similar to it, you have to have that partition set for a particular filesystem, like for example if I had a 2 gb partition with the fs ext3 but I wanted to have a fat32 partition I would simply have to delete the ext3 partition and more space would be re-allotted to the fat32 partition that already existed. Would that really change if your entire HD was set for ext2/ext3? I would assume you would have to do a dos format from a dos boot disk, or run some type of partition program that would change the fs to fat32 but that would basically be a "format?? But I don't know that for sure because all I have is RH installed on a 1.1gb partition and windoze and it's programs installed on a 3.2gb partition.

please forgive me if this is totally inaccurate, because I only have a limited knowledge of HDs..

Oh, and one other thing, how could a piece of software change the architecture of a piece of hardware, if I run linux it isn't going to change the architecture of my processor. If it was changing the architecture of a HD wouldn't it be changing cylinder/head numbers, etc, and I highly doubt a home user could do that without some sort of specialized machine...