On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, cll muzh said:
Low-level formats should never be necessary, IMHO. A complete format+check does the same sort of thing.
I question whether that's true in all cases. I have a couple of damaged IDE drives from my portables that won't format. If I had a low level format utility I might be able get around the problem. I think surface damage issues are sometimes best handled this way. I also think it depends on the drive design. I'm not sure that all drives are designed to do auto sector re-allocation when they encounter read / write errors. And if it's available, I don't see why I shouldn't use it - it's not black magic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- John Karns jkarns@csd.net