IIRC, the necessity of low level formating was because of the positioning motor on the HD's reading arm. With MFM and RLL drives, after a while the arm would not align with the cylinders and a low level format had to be done to realign the cylinders with the read head.
With the advent of stepper(?) motors, the alignment problems went away and low level formating wasn't necessary, and as Bastaain demonstrated, even dangerous. I have done low level formatting on my MFM drives (with a program from Gibson Research <www.grc.com> called, "SpinRite"), but never have done it, nor will I try to do it, on an IDE drive unless the drive has become completely useless, the information is on another drive, and I just want to experiment. I see that there is now a "SpinRite 5.0," but don't know if it will do low level formating of IDE drives. Roger Turk Tucson, Arizona Juha Sahakangas wrote: . > Bastiaan Edelman, PA3FFZ wrote: . > > I did a low level format on a HD and it is unusable ever since :-((((( . > You might want to try and run another "low level format" on it - using . > utility software you can download probably from HD manufacturer. . > As Michal stated and you noticed the hard way, "old fashioned" low level . > format isn't good for your poor IDE drives health...
