FDISK will not remove corrupt partition tables or corrupt boot sectors
which is why it is sometimes necessary to LLF. Not all bad sectors are
permanent or necessarily mean that the drive is bad. All hard drives
routinely get bad  sectors......you just don't know about it because hard
drive manufactures allow extra space to automatically and seamlessly
replace those bad sectors....but when you run out of that extra space you
start noticing the bad sectors.

If you have a physically damaged bad sector then you have a permanent
condition but if the damage is write damage...magnetic damage ...then very
often a LLF will restore the sector. Even if there is physical damage and
you have a few bad sectors it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be a
continuing process.

I have one old AT drive that has about 25 megs of bad sectors which is
probably physical damage. It occurred all at once.  The bad sectors occur
at the beginning and end of the drive. I wouldn't try to use this as a boot
drive  however I  partitioned this drive as an extended partition with
three logical drives. Two tiny ones at the beginning and end of the drive
contain the marked bad sectors and a big clean logical drive remains in the
middle. I then hid the two partitions containing the bad sectors and now my
computer sees the drive as one clean drive. I have been running that drive
for years like this with no further bad sectors. I wouldn't put my data
files on it but as a download drive or a temporary drive it does fine.

m

>>My question is can someone recommend a utility, freeware would be
>>exceptionally great, to do a low level format of this drive?
>
>===============
>Fdisk, which came with DOS at least through 6.22. You may need to do a
>surface analysis on the disk since it could be losing sectors. If this
>proves to be the case I would say, "chuck it," since once a disk's  surface
>(hard or floppy) starts to go bad it will continue to do so.
>=====Korny=====

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