Low-level formatting is the process of outlining the positions of the tracks and sectors on the hard disk, and writing the control structures that define where the tracks and sectors are. This is often called a "true" formatting operation, because it really creates the physical format that defines where the data is stored on the disk. The first time that a low-level format ("LLF") is performed on a hard disk, the disk's platters start out empty. That's the last time the platters will be empty for the life of the drive. If an LLF is done on a disk with data on it already, the data is permanently erased (save heroic data recovery measures which are sometimes possible).

If you've explored other areas of this material describing hard disks, you have learned that modern hard disks are much more precisely designed and built, and much more complicated than older disks. Older disks had the same number of sectors per track, and did not use dedicated controllers. It was necessary for the external controller to do the low-level format, and quite easy to describe the geometry of the drive to the controller so it could do the LLF. Newer disks use many complex internal structures, including zoned bit recording to put more sectors on the outer tracks than the inner ones, and embedded servo data to control the head actuator. They also transparently map out bad sectors. Due to this complexity, all modern hard disks are low-level formatted at the factory for the life of the drive. There's no way for the PC to do an LLF on a modern IDE/ATA or SCSI hard disk, and there's no reason to try to do so.

Older drives needed to be re-low-level-formatted occasionally because of the thermal expansion problems associated with using stepper motor actuators. Over time, the tracks on the platters would move relative to where the heads expected them to be, and errors would result. These could be corrected by doing a low-level format, rewriting the tracks in the new positions that the stepper motor moved the heads to. This is totally unnecessary with modern voice-coil-actuated hard disks.

More input from FAQ Farmers:

• The only time you could low level format a new voice coil hard drive if it you would have bad sector that are not being taken care by the hard disk logic. Most of the time you will have a utility to do this task that comes from the manufacturer of the drive and it will not work with any other brand. Maxtor and late quantum has a utility called Max blast plus and power max and others. They are used to diagnostic but also to fix at the low level.

• Those utilities can many times restore an unstable drive by reformatting at the low level and blocking out bad sector. Of course if the RLL (magnetic data) is low because the read write hardware is defective it will do no good. If the surface was damaged it could give the drive a new life.

• There is also an application called Spinrite (by Steve Gibson) It's not a low level format in itself but it reads and rewrites the data (at the low level) while analyzing the disk. Spinrite is over 17 years old and has been updated to the new technology ever since version 1 (current version is 6). I's a very respected software by all the hard disk service technician around the world. Steeve Gibson is one (if not the best) of the best hard disk low level white hat hacker in the world.

• No software of any sort can truly low-level format today's modern drives. The ability to low-level format hard drives was lost back in the early 1990's when disc surfaces began incorporating factory written "embedded servo data". If you have a very old drive that can truly be low-level reformatted, SpinRite v5.0 will do that for you ( But this is only possible on very old non-servo based MFM and RLL drives with capacities up to a few hundred megabytes. You can still read and write from that "so called" low level but not in the same way it was original;y possible then with old drives.

Put a floppy disk in the drive. With Windows, go to file save as, then go to the drop down box. At the top of that box, go the 3 1/2 floppy and save it.

it is done by a reading light that passes over dints in the disk which is allocated inside the platic cover which forms the binery cod 1 and 0 forming data blocks form the code, e.g

110110010111011101101

thanks boris

The answer above is refering in principle to how CD's work - NOT floppies. Floppy disks store binary data as a series of magnetic dots on the surface of the disk and are written to / read from by a voice coil (electro-magnet).

By definition, there are 1000 gigabytes (GB) in 1 terabyte (TB). The prefix giga- means billion, 109, and tera- means trillion, 1012.

There is another similar unit called the terabinary byte, or tebibyte. RAM sizes are based on powers of 2, due to binary addressing, so when RAM is big enough to measure in the tebibytes, it will be equal to 1024 gibibytes.

On a ship or other moving vehicle, storage would be where cargo is kept. Stowage is any holder made for specific contents, usually fasten-able so that nothing shifts during transit.

For example, I store groceries in the trunk of my car. The spare tire is stowed underneath, securely bolted.

A hard drive is non-volitile memory for a computer meaning when the power is removed the memory is still there. It is called a hard drive because the substrate for the memory is a number of rigid aluminum discs as opposed to the old floppy drives which had a flexible substrate.

A rigid magnetic disk fixed permanently within a drive unit and used for storing computer data.

Most hard drive manufacturers advertise their hard drives in even looking numbers, but in truth the actual hard drive capacity is a bit lower than the advertised amount. Generally it goes in an exponential fashion, for example, if you bought a 250GB hard drive, it might actually have a total of 215GB, whereas if you bought an advertised 1TB drive, it may actually have a total of 770GB.