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Do I need to low level format my drive and if so, how do I do this?
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You cannot perform an actual low-level format on some ATA hard-disk drives. This information and the way it is written cannot be duplicated in any way outside of the factory. The servo, sector layout, and defect-management information contained in the low-level format is designed to last the life of the drive. ATA hard drives manufactured today ignore low-level format routines.
However, utilities are available that can be used to purge the drive of a corrupted master boot record, a boot block virus, or to clear any recoverable bad sectors or clusters. For example, Quantum's DataEraser utility has these capabilities.
Note: Some manufactures do have routines they label as a low-level formatter. These routines actually perform a write, read, and verify of the drive's user data sectors, they don't actually low-level format the disk drive.
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