Anyone know a good, free, low level format utility that works well with large drives??
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Anyone know a good, free, low level format utility that works well with large drives??
I think most of the drive setup tools (ontrack) support LLF.
Might be worth looking into..
try <a href="http://www.filelibrary.com/Contents/DOS/49/26.html" target="_blank">here,</a> it may provide some good links for what your after.
Actually, nowadays there is no such term called as "low level format" utility. It used to be when were MFM drives,and some of an old motherboards even had such option built-in BIOS, but modern drives now simply ignoring that LLF command... :rolleyes:
Although some of manufacturers still call their utilities as LLF, they are in fact just only zero-filling utlities what doing clearing data fields of the sectors on the harddrives.
Some of those utilities, however,does have an extended capabilities (such as remapping bad sectors on the drive's surface).
Which exactly utility You should use, comletely depends on what exactly the problem You want to solve.
And using zero-fill ("LLF") utility from HDD manufacturer is the safest way to go in the most of cases...
I don't mean to sound like a smarta$$ or a dumba$$ but, why would you want to do that? I honestly can't think of any situation that requires more than an fdisk /mbr, but then again I don't know everything.
If you go to the website of the HDD manufacturer they will often have utilities for you to use that are free and designed for that particular HDD.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by ,:
<strong>Anyone know a good, free, low level format utility that works well with large drives??</strong></font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Nice to see you around again... <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />
I have had some drive where the volume label is corrupt. The only way I have found to get around it was to write zeros to the drive. If there is a better way let me know. Thanks Keystone