>> My main concern is if I do a low level reformat with all zeros, and then
>> at a later date reinitialize the drive, would it then lose it's updated
>> map and revert to the factory's map?
>
> No. re-initializing the drive happens at a higher level than re-mapping
> bad sectors.
For the better part of a decade, if not more, commodity hard drives have
employed a strategy whereby:
1) all tracks are NOT alike (they may be grouped into like-formatted
"zones" wherein all tracks within a "zone" are indeed formatted
identically, but there are many "zones" and which take into account the
facts that the outer tracks can accommodate many more sectors than can the
inner tracks),
2) although the early hard drives, back in the ST506 and ST412 era, had
in-line identifiers ("IDs") and data, each of which was followed by a
check polynomial, more modern drives employ a quite different strategy,
namely, the IDs are maintained separately, in a ROM, and the entire
surface of the media is utilized for data; this is the so-called "ID-less"
formatting strategy, pioneered, I believe, by IBM San Jose (later sold to
Hitachi and resurrected as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies which,
incidentally, is expected to be soon sold to Western Digital).
Also,
3) most device initializers are incapable of performing a true low-level
format, as the drive firmware prevents this from occurring; the "format
drive" command is indeed accepted as a valid command, and "good status" is
indeed returned to the host, but the command itself is treated as a "no
operation", and nothing is actually done.
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