low level formating, any idea?

[d_unbeliever]

one of my friends have 4 bad sectors in his hard disk. he found this out after running windows scandisk...he asked me to low level format his hard disk in order to fix these bad sectors or remove it. he does not have yet budget to buy new hard disk and i can loan him money coz i don't have also the money

is there such thing as low formatting or low format of HD?
how is this done?
will it remove or fix the bad sectors in a HD?

what is the effect of these bad sectors in burning vcd movies, especially when you create cd image first before burning, if there is any effect?

i read somewhere in the website of Seagate that there is no such thing as low level formatting or low format...any idea?

[stiltman]

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/low-level-format.html

[miksu]

Every modern hard drive has certain amount of spare sectors that aren't "included" in drives capacity. That's normal. Every drive has certain amount of disk surface defects that increase as time passes. They are there already, when drive is shipped from factory. Drive is able to find those new defects and use those spare sectors for saving data from new defect areas.

At some point, amount of those bad sectors passes amount of "spare" sectors. At that point, drives ability to fix itself is exceeded and new one should be obtained as fast as possible, better today than tomorrow. That's why low level formatting hard drives is nowadays impossible or helluva difficult. And it shouldn't be used, since drive isn't really reliable anymore. Another problem is that list of defects maker has coded into drive, is simply lost.

Hope there is back-up of everything valuable? Last moments...

And suppose you already know difference between real bad sectors (media) and windows file system errors and way Windows reports it?

BOTTOMLINE IS: IF IT'S REALLY MEDIA DEFECT, THE DRIVE SHOULD BE REPLACED IMMEDIATELY. NO MODERN DRIVE CAN BE RELIABLY FIXED WITH LOW-LEVEL FORMAT Of course, it may fail tomorrow or after next then years of use, but I wouldn't try...

It was way to try with old MFM/RLL/ESDI drives back in the 80's, they didn't have spare sectors or track marks encoded in the data track (as they had magnetically coded, discreet track for head positioning)[/b]

[d_unbeliever]

tnx a lot guys for the info's...now i know what will i do