What does low-level format do on an ATA (IDE) drive?
Depends on how old the ATA drive is and who made it. Lets talk about what low-level formatting is… In the old days of MFM, RLL and ESDI, a new hard disk drive was just like a new unformatted floppy – there was nothing on it. The drive had to be connected to a controller and the controller had to be told how many sectors per track to lay down on each track – this is the same thing you do when you format a floppy these days. Formatting of each track creates the inter sector gaps, the sector ID fields and the sector data fields. Most MFM/RLL/ESDI controllers include a small low-level formatting program in ROM. You generally use DOS DEBUG to enter this program. Lets talk about what high-level formatting is… High level formatting creates a file system within a partition of a hard disk or on a floppy. This process writes the initial version of the boot record, root directory and file allocation table (FAT). Here is a bit of confusion – when you use the DOS FORMAT command to format a flop
