Me, sensitive? LOL! Not really. I just want to make sure that anything I post has an accurate basis in fact. Normally when I discuss something on a forum, some so-called expert with a vague understanding of hardware tends to come along and nitpick to death whatever I've written ... which completely eclipses the reason I was posting in the first place ... which was to help someone. If it happens often enough, you'd be careful, too. If that makes me sensitive, I guess I should start collecting floral ties. ;-)
Since I'm here, let's go over a couple of things.
First, the "damage" I mentioned was in reference to the disk surface of the hard drive, not the drive motor. This is called a "Hard Error". Using your anology, if I'm driving my car, and it throws a rod, it's going to require either a major overhaul to repair it, or I'll have to buy a new engine. Either way, the car isn't going to be moving under its own power again, not anytime soon ... and certainly not without a tow truck.
I don't know anything about pre-formatted drives, either, because they don't exist to my knowledge ... not straight from the manufacturer. At least, not in the way that you mentioned.
There are two types of formatting. Physical or Low-Level Formatting, and DOS Formatting.
When a hard drive is first manufactured, it has only tracks and cylinders, no sectors. Low-Level Formatting is a process whereby the sectors are "drawn" on each track, using magnetism as the "ink". This process also writes out the sector ID's that will be used by the operating system to locate data on the disk.
Since this kind of formatting is usually done by the manufacturer, unless you have been working with hardware for several years (say, like a decade or more), it's unlikely that you, and/or the majority of users have ever done a Low-Level Format. When EIDE drives came on the scene, the reliability of the drives went up considerably, and Low-Level Formatting became an antiquated, and usually unnecessary process after being done once, at the factory. In these days, with DOS being phased out, the only time I've seen the this kind of program in recent years was in a SCSI BIOS utilities package.
There was a time when it was recommended that a hard drive be Low-Level Formatted about once a year, especially when the drive and the controller were separate components, such as with an ESDI system.
You would use this to refresh the sector ID's on the disk, and to change the interleave factor, if necessary.
The process, when done by a home user, was usually performed with a DOS program like DEBUG, DM or HFORMAT.
The ordinary DOS FORMAT command is not the same, and performs a different function.
This command creates the Master Boot Record, which contains the partition information to the divide the physical drive into logical drives. It also creates the DOS boot record, and the File Allocation Table, which is a map of what clusters are associated with what files.
Finally, it creates the the root directory, which is the basis of the tree-structured file system, and the Data Area, where the actual user data goes.
This command does not touch the MBR or the user data area, which is why a formatted hard drive can often be recovered if no program has overwritten the data area.
That's the difference between the two. I hope this makes what I have previously written a little easier to understand.
I appreciate the offer to go to work at my shop, but since I'm the owner (and the hardware troubleshooter) ... you won't mind if I say no, right? I need my job! <GRIN>
Toejam31
<font color=purple>If there was a reason for everything, having faith would be redundant.</font color=purple>
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