Guilherme grunted, > > But you shouldn't ever low level format a hard drive. It isn't necessary > > any more since the 80's.
> More that that, it's REALLY dangerous to do so in new IDE drives (something > to do > with geometry parameters, if I'm not mistaken)... I have an old one I'd like to try it on, but the bios doesn't do it. I stuck it in another machine briefly, and now it absolutely refuses to work as a primary (but is just fine as a slave). It's an old caviar 540 for the kids' machine. Right now they have my machine, because that machine can't boot from the slave (or even use it without a primary present), nor can it recognize more than 1024 cylinders (or use the alternate modes). So it sees my 8g drive as a 540 or so :( I noticed the box on a new 20G at sam's club yesterday claimed it had software to get around old bios's, but I'm not willing to pay $250 just to get an old 486 running (the kids' stuff is almost all windows, so I have to deal with bios problems :( rick > Now, how would I LOW FORMAT a floppy disk??? That should happen on a regular formatk, shouldn't it? (the current command is "superformat") --