how to format my hard drive without a boot disk

The Basic Long Test can take several hours to complete, depending on the capacity of the drive. The Basic Short Test takes less than a minute to complete. After startup, it is a good idea to test your drive.

Boot from the CD media or diskette to start SeaTools for DOS. The download routine for SeaTools for DOS creates a bootable CD or floppy diskette. Zero Fill writes zeros in each data sector for the complete capacity of the drive and cleans up most defects. It includes three Erase (Zero Fill) options. SeaTools for DOS can be downloaded from the SeaTools homepage. Some system BIOS may include a Low-Level Format option these should be avoided, as they may produce undesirable results. The Zero Fill erase option in SeaTools for DOS is the best method for use with Seagate hard drives. Make sure the drive is completely backed up before proceeding. Zero Filling a SATA or ATA (IDE) drive destroys 100% of the data on the drive. Similarly, when a disc drive writes data (like a zero fill erase procedure) and encounters a problem, the drive firmware retires the problem sector and activates a replacement before giving successful write status. In this situation the actual data bytes in the sector are preserved and transferred to the new spare during a sector reallocation. Usually, sectors become difficult to read long before they become impossible to read.

To scan for bad sectors that can be detected and replaced with good spare sectors when writing to the sectors.īy design, modern disc drives maintain spare sectors for reallocation purposes. To erase confidential information for privacy reasons.

To change from one operating system to another and wish to remove everything from the drive. To remove a virus that cannot be removed without destroying the boot sector. The most common reasons to Zero Fill a SATA or ATA (IDE) hard drive are: This is a simple process of writing all zeros (0's) to the entire hard disk drive. The only safe method of initializing all the data on a Seagate device is the zero fill erase option in SeaTools for DOS. The low-level process first used years ago in MFM hard drives bears little resemblance to what we now call a 'low-level format' for today's SATA and ATA (IDE) drives. What does 'low level format' a SATA or ATA (IDE) drive mean?Īctually the term 'low level' is a bit of a misnomer.

How to format my hard drive without a boot disk