Hi,
Ref Low Level Formatting a Hard Drive.
See
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/Irritate/Irritate.html
Quote
Q. Will low-level formatting ruin my hard drive?
A. Maybe, but probably not.
On a few old IDE drives, it might. Most recent IDE drives simply ignore the low-level format command and pretend they did it.
For SCSI, you should generally not need to low-level format the drive (and some SCSI drives ignore the command, too).
If you must do a low-level format, make sure there are no power interruptions and that you give it adequate time to finish. A full low-level format can take quite a while, half an hour or more for large or slow drives."
Regards, Michael
aka rockape