Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!midway!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!o.gp.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!jc58+ From: jc58+@andrew.cmu.edu (Johnny J. Chin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware Subject: Re: Low-level format of hard disk Message-ID: Date: 10 Oct 90 09:52:53 GMT Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 30 The only problem I know of when you excessively format a hard drive is the wear you place on the heads. This has caused some drives to pre-maturely fail. But then again, the drives that have failed on were ones where the user uses the drive a lot and low-level formatted every 3 months. I agree that low-level formatting a drive will reclaim some bad spots and is relatively easy to do. However, reclaiming bad spots may be bad because the bad spot could have come about from use, thus reclaiming it will cause bad data later during use. In general, I don't recommend low-level formatting the drives regularly; do it only when you need to. I do recommend the use of a track aligning utility and/or a deframenting utility. These programs will usually do whatever is that you need (ie. realign all the tracks, make all available sectors continuous, etc.). In addition, if you partition the drive (1- programs, 2- data), you will only have deframented data in the 2-partition (data). I hope this bit of information is useful. __________ ___ / \ / / /-/ / /\/ _/ / / / __/. /__ / / / / / / / / "Happy Computing ..." / / ARPAnet: Johnny.J.Chin@andrew.cmu.edu / ------- / 4730 Centre Ave. #412 BITnet: jc58@andrew \__________/ Pittsburgh, PA 15213 UUCP: ...!uunet!andrew.cmu.edu!jc58 Computer Dr. ______________________________________________________________________________ Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are STRICTLY my own, and not CMU's.