rogerk Posted May 25, 2007 Share Posted May 25, 2007 Is there a Low Level Disk Drive utility that runs on Mac OSX I need to do a low level format in OSX on a 160Gb SATA drive Anybody know of one? Help please Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beatrice Posted May 25, 2007 Share Posted May 25, 2007 Go to the website of the drive manufacturer. Seagate, WD, and Maxtor have utilities you can download to create a boot floppy or CD that will erase all partition and boot sector information, or even write zeros to the entire drive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rogerk Posted May 25, 2007 Author Share Posted May 25, 2007 Its a Maxtor and the Maxblast software does not do a Low Level format need something like Ontrack Disk Manager i corrupted the drive playing around loading OSX on it There are plenty of pc utils Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Proteo Posted May 25, 2007 Share Posted May 25, 2007 Disk Utility -> Erease -> Security Options Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beatrice Posted May 25, 2007 Share Posted May 25, 2007 >Its a Maxtor and the Maxblast software does not do a Low Level format >i corrupted the drive playing around loading OSX on it There's no such thing as low-level format for IDE/PATA/SATA drives. Maybe at the factory but not as a software utility. Just checked the Maxtor website (which jumps to Seagate). If the Maxblast utility doesn't have the erase feature, you can download SeaTools for DOS, it creates a boot floppy. Then you can erase track 0 or the entire drive, either way and the disk will be clean of all boot, partition, and OS information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rogerk Posted May 25, 2007 Author Share Posted May 25, 2007 Been low level formating drives for years SCSI is built into the controller, some older motherboards had the utility in bios, Ontrac Disk Manages does it, but my full copy is old and does not do SATA Good ones remap bad sectors as SCSI ones do, producing a clean error free drive This SW does it on a pc, HDD Low Level Format Tool is a freeware utility for low-level hard disk drive formatting. This small program will erase, Low-Level Format and re-certify a SATA, IDE or SCSI hard disk drive. Will work with USB and FIREWIRE external drive enclosures. Low-level formatting of Flash Cards is supported too. Low Level Format Tool will clear partitions, MBR, and every bit of user data. <http://www.downloadjunction.com/product/store/26582/index.html> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siddharth Posted May 26, 2007 Share Posted May 26, 2007 Use Darik's Boot & Nuke. Simply the best. Boot from the CD & you can erase drives with various algorithms. Here are the features: Wipe Methods Quick Erase (Fills Drive with 0's) Canadian RCMP TSSIT OPS-II Standard Wipe American DoD 5220-22.M Standard Wipe Gutmann Wipe PRNG Stream Wipe Enhancements 8/33/137 gigabyte disk size BIOS limit fix Fast PRNG (Mersenne Twister) Entropy Seeding Verification Logging Hardware Drivers Controllers: XT, IDE, PATA, SATA, SCSI Consoles: Serial, HGA, VGA Buses: ISA, MCA, PCI So... basically it's killer. And Oh yeah! Did I mention? It's Open Source. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mABNER Posted May 26, 2007 Share Posted May 26, 2007 with the built in disk utility you can fill it with 0's as well... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siddharth Posted May 27, 2007 Share Posted May 27, 2007 Well yes you can, but DBAN is still far more superior... You don't need an OS and can boot from a CD containing it in seconds since it uses the Linux kernel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D4V3 Posted May 28, 2007 Share Posted May 28, 2007 try Acronis boot loader it will let you format the hdd and there are utilites that will let you low level format the hdd but usually you can get them from the manufacturer. and if the unit is not posting from that drive you will have to boot from another hdd and use an external sata to usb connector. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ferret-Simpson Posted May 28, 2007 Share Posted May 28, 2007 But he wants a LOW LEVEL format. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
siddharth Posted May 28, 2007 Share Posted May 28, 2007 Just use DBAN. It's fantastic. Trust me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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