But you probably also can get such a tool free from the maker of your HDD, whatever company that is. DBAN is freeware that can do a Zero Fill for you.
BUT you most certainly can do a Zero-Fill, and it should do what you need. (The whole process can take a good few hours. Actually, nobody can do a 'Low Level Format' any more - that operation can only be done in the factory when the HDD is made. The perks of using the dedicated tools made by manufacturers is that they may perform the formatting faster if you use them with the same-brand hard drive.
Bootable low level format tool download#
Click below to download these tools for each manufacturer. HDD Scan 3.3 HDDScan is a Low-level HDD diagnostic tool, it scans surface find bad sectors etc.
Most of the major hard drive manufacturers have their own zero-filling tools, which usually require booting from a CD or USB drive. HDD Low Level Format Tool 2.36 Low-level format tool for S-ATA (SATA), IDE (E-IDE), SCSI, USB, Flash Cards and FIREWIRE external drive enclosures.
Bootable low level format tool how to#
How to Low-Level Format/Zero-Fill Your Hard Drive The modern equivalent to low-level formatting is “zero-filling”, whereby you replace all data on your hard drive with arbitrary zeros or other characters, making that data deleted and unrecoverable. However, there are equivalent processes that carry out similar functions. Today, modern (SATA and ATA) hard drives are low-level formatted upon manufacture and can’t technically be low-level formatted again in the same way as old MFM drives used to be. It was used in the past to get rid of all existing data on old MFM hard disks permanently – useful if you had sensitive data that you wanted gone forever, were selling your hard drive, or if you had a severe virus, such as a boot-sector virus, which couldn’t be removed using the standard formatting process.
Low-level formatting formats your hard drive past the point of no return because it wipes all existing sectors on the physical surface of your drive rather than just on the filesystem. An important thing to know is that the meaning of “low-level formatting” has changed over time, and this efficient formatting method has largely been replaced today by something known as “zero-filling.” Here’s everything you need to know about this process and the tools you need to do it.