I am looking for a DOS based low level format-ing hard drive and SSD drive

[eccerr0r]

Re: I am looking for a DOS based low level format-ing hard drive and SSD drive

We need to make the distinction between low level format and doing housekeeping maintenance. VC servo tracks have a chicken and egg problem if you're trying to rewrite them, and as this truly is at the lowest level, this can't be done on VC disks.

Fortunately on stepper disks the lowest level does not contain servo data, just sector boundaries, so it's a lot simpler on these older disks.

[sam_sam_sam]

Yes I am resuming my old post back to life because I recently realized that I had bought a subscription for Spine Rite 6.0 and I can upgrade to 6.1 which is the newer version of this software

I have some very old laptop computers that I might want to put back in to service but I need to format the hard drives because these computers were windows 7 originally but on there on went to windows 10 and made them boot very slow and responsive is very slow as well they were decent when they were running windows 7

But more on that later when I have time to work on them

[stj]

wipe the drives by booting a linux live-image.
then using the DD command to write 0's to the whole drive.
from a commandline you can type "man dd" for the manual
or "dd --help" for a bit less to read.

[stj]

typed it for you

dd --help
Usage: dd [OPERAND]...
or: dd OPTION
Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands.

bs=BYTES read and write up to BYTES bytes at a time (default: 512);
overrides ibs and obs
cbs=BYTES convert BYTES bytes at a time
conv=CONVS convert the file as per the comma separated symbol list
count=N copy only N input blocks
ibs=BYTES read up to BYTES bytes at a time (default: 512)
if=FILE read from FILE instead of stdin
iflag=FLAGS read as per the comma separated symbol list
obs=BYTES write BYTES bytes at a time (default: 512)
of=FILE write to FILE instead of stdout
oflag=FLAGS write as per the comma separated symbol list
seek=N (or oseek=N) skip N obs-sized output blocks
skip=N (or iseek=N) skip N ibs-sized input blocks
status=LEVEL The LEVEL of information to print to stderr;
'none' suppresses everything but error messages,
'noxfer' suppresses the final transfer statistics,
'progress' shows periodic transfer statistics

N and BYTES may be followed by the following multiplicative suffixes:
c=1, w=2, b=512, kB=1000, K=1024, MB=1000*1000, M=1024*1024, xM=M,
GB=1000*1000*1000, G=1024*1024*1024, and so on for T, P, E, Z, Y, R, Q.
Binary prefixes can be used, too: KiB=K, MiB=M, and so on.
If N ends in 'B', it counts bytes not blocks.

Each CONV symbol may be:

ascii from EBCDIC to ASCII
ebcdic from ASCII to EBCDIC
ibm from ASCII to alternate EBCDIC
block pad newline-terminated records with spaces to cbs-size
unblock replace trailing spaces in cbs-size records with newline
lcase change upper case to lower case
ucase change lower case to upper case
sparse try to seek rather than write all-NUL output blocks
swab swap every pair of input bytes
sync pad every input block with NULs to ibs-size; when used
with block or unblock, pad with spaces rather than NULs
excl fail if the output file already exists
nocreat do not create the output file
notrunc do not truncate the output file
noerror continue after read errors
fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
fsync likewise, but also write metadata

Each FLAG symbol may be:

append append mode (makes sense only for output; conv=notrunc suggested)
direct use direct I/O for data
directory fail unless a directory
dsync use synchronized I/O for data
sync likewise, but also for metadata
fullblock accumulate full blocks of input (iflag only)
nonblock use non-blocking I/O
noatime do not update access time
nocache Request to drop cache. See also oflag=sync
noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
nofollow do not follow symlinks

Sending a USR1 signal to a running 'dd' process makes it
print I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.

Options are:

--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit

GNU coreutils online help: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
Full documentation <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/dd>
or available locally via: info '(coreutils) dd invocation'

[harp]

" You can find much contradictory information regarding this topic. Hard drive manufacturers themselves don't like to talk about it. But generally, hard drives are much more resistant to big magnets than expected. The hard drive coating usually provides a high level of coercivity. This means you would have to bring a very large magnet very close to a hard drive in order to delete files. As long as you don't unscrew the top cover of the hard drive, you won't be able to get close enough. " .................. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G3eURKwqbN8

[stj]

if you use a degausing method the drive will be fucked.
they have calibration data and sometimes the firmware stored on the platters.

[Mattz_GT]

For some drives, there may be a utility from the maker which can verify and spare out bad sectors, Spinrite tries to achieve this, but may not have the same level of access as the maker utility - though TBH, if have bad sectors to deal with, more are likely to turn up.
If the maker utility offers a zero fill, that might also perform bad sector sparing even if it doesn't specifically say so