Hence permanent damage can (and probably will) occur if you do this!įor old MFM or RLL hard disk drives, each hard disk manufacturer would provide instructions on how to low-level format the drive - this typically involved using the DOS DEBUG.COM program to communicate directly with the hard disk controller card and send it an instruction to low-level format the hard disk (these hard disk controllers had a "ROM BIOS extension" with a low-level format program built-in). If you're wanting to format an IDE or SCSI hard disk these come from the factory already low-level formatted, so jump straight to step 2.Īgain, to be clear: WARNING: DO NOT LOW-LEVEL FORMAT AN IDE DRIVE! They have special hidden areas of the drive that store information about its capacity which is wiped out if low-level formatted. This step is *only* needed if you have an extremely old MFM or RLL hard disk drive. Low-level formatting a hard disk actually physically formats it - it actually lays down tracks and sectors and it wipes all data off the drive. In the early days of the PC there were 3 programs you needed to run to format a hard disk:ģ) Run FORMAT.exe to "high-level format" the disk. Formatting a hard disk in DOS requires a few more tasks and careful thinking compared to formatting a floppy disk.
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