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I interrupted a low-level format on a hard drive before it completed. Now the drive won work. What happened?

April 26, 2017drive format happened interrupted low-level

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I interrupted a low-level format on a hard drive before it completed. Now the drive won work. What happened?

1 Answer

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10 Posted

A. Most SCSI drives will go into a “stupid” mode if a low-level format is interrupted. In this mode, the drive knows there isn’t a complete format, and refuses to do anything *except* a low-level format. The cure is to do a full low-level format and let it complete. Some people find that the only way to do this is with a PC SCSI system. IDE drives generally don’t have this problem, since most now ignore the low-level format command.