Reply to post: Re: "Low level format"

Re: "Low level format"

"Also know to most techies as simply "format". There is no such thing as "high-level format". There is formatting, and there is deletion of the partition table. Microsoft's "quick format" is therefore not formatting anything. "low-level" format here would not be (more) indicative of deliberate mischief."

There used to be. A low-level format actually re-wrote all the sector information, including setting the interleave value to optimise the drive for the PC and marking the known bad sectors, and a high-level format (or, as you correctly say, a "format"), wrote the file system. Once IDE came along, low level format commands either did nothing or just reinitialised the partition tables.

low level format:

debug

g=c800:0007

Then do fdisk to write the partition tables

Then format the file system,