how to format an ide hard disc in a usb enclosure

[Alexander Sack]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Julian Stacey <jhs at berklix.org> wrote:
> I know, hence the background, yes I'm fully aware of all repercusions thanks :-)

Then if you understand IDE, understand what a low-level format really
is (was), then you know that this is probably NOT what you want to do
on your disk and understand it will NOT fix your problem.

Other than some special vendor utility or BIOS utility, low-level
format doesn't make sense for IDE disks.  There is no command for
"format" and trying to reset the geometry like the old days doesn't
even apply to modern disks.

If you want to try a low-level format tool (for IDE that is probably
just writing 0's or 1's to every sector on the disk and letting the
hard disk automatically map bad blocks), I would just dd all zero's to
it then try to create a filesystem.  If you still get media errors,
your disk is foobar or about to be foobar, its cheap and you already
stated you don't have any critical data on it so buy a new disk!  :D

In fact Seagate offers a Windows too to do exactly this called ZeroFill:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=65a8783c970ce010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-GB

Not trying to be too cheeky here, but I think what you are asking
doesn't makes sense...at least to me....

Thanks!

-aps