The only low level format utilities I have ever seen or used are those as
part of old 486 BIOS to be used on old MMF / RLL drives or the recent ones
supplied by the hard drive manufacturers that are only for their particular
EIDE or SCSI drives .Even those are pseudo LLFs....for example WDs writes
0s to the drive in order to cleanse it. Some manufacturers have different
ones for different kinds of drives. I have never heard of a general utility
that will work on all drives and I would be very leery about using
something like this....even PowerQuest doesn't have anything.

A manufacture LLF is often the only way to get rid of a corrupted partition
table or boot sector but using one incorrectly may destroy a drive. These
utilities are usually on manufactures web sites and you have to go through
a knowledge base or troubleshooting guide to get them....and there are lots
of warnings.

m


>My question is can someone recommend a utility, freeware would be
>exceptionally great, to do a low level format of this drive?
>The computer is a Dell 166 pentium. The hard drive is a western digital
>caviar 2.5 GB. I have 64 megs of RAM and run win 98. The drive is now the
>slave drive while I salvage my jokes.
>Mary

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