[Hollowpoint]

I once did a low level format accidentally on an ide drive.


my friend used the bios util (low level format) , then I came and fdisked after , without knowing he had done it.

for a 400mb hard drive it took a very long time (45 minutes) to format, but the worst was yet to come.

Whilst trying to reinstall DOS onto it , we noticed the drives read / write speed had slowed down to a grinding crawl, so we decided to boot the PC with a boot floppy.

It booted fine, but "sys c:" (the command used to copy the system files to the hard drive to make it bootable) took over 25 minutes to complete, and a small text file (2kb) took over 11 minutes.

Further analysis revealed that we had managed to wipe the boot partition, boot sector, logisitics sector, both FATs and lots more.

We checked in bios and the heads, cylinders and sectors didnt register, the drive itself was detected in fdisk, but not bios, it was almost as if we had wiped the drive parameters section right off the hard drive. It was never recovered, and cost £200 to replace.

1. always check the pc is working before you work on it, this way the customer cant tell you it was working, when it wasnt.
2. never low level format an ide drive.

if you attempt any of the above, on your own head be it.