What type of drive are you wanting to low level format? I had a friend of mine that I loaned a HD (his HD had crashed.) He had someone else remove it and the guy put a volume label of "Big Fucker" on it. Well, I was pissed that this idiot would be so unprofessional (this was in a professional office environment.) All this guy did to protect the data was to high level format it. It took me maybe an hour to restore everything and break the passwords in the system. I don't think much of "format" as a way of erasing data ... that you want to *stay* erased :)!!! MFM/RLL/ESDI/etc type drives are easy to low level format, but the later IDE drives were a problem unless you had the particular software to format that drive. I would love to hear more from anyone that has done low level format on the early IDE drives. Gene Ehrich wrote:

Gene, When you low level, you'll wipe out the C: partition and eliminate the command.com file plus the hidden system files. If the high level format you gave C: was good enough, why not just then format D: and then format E: You'll need to use the external command file FORMAT.??? ( forget whether it was .EXE or .COM and don't have the time to break out a book to check. Left as an excercise for the reader ) You need the one from the same version of DOS that your COMMAND.COM ( and hidden files IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS or their counterparts from IBM DOS ) came from ( unless you try SETVER, but that is not something I had ever had the occasion to try ). But if you really want to low level, either use DEBUG, or a third party package, such as OnTrack's Disk Manager or Spin Write for example. Disk Manager will end up asking you to enter your bad sector mapping. Best Regards At 11:20 PM 8/20/03 -0400, you wrote: