![]() (The whole process can take a good few hours.)Īlternatively, you can use a great little tool called DBAN which you can use with any brand of hard drive and will erase all your existing hard drive data with six passes. 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. Click below to download these tools for each manufacturer. Most of the major hard drive manufacturers have their own zero-filling tools, which usually require booting from a CD or USB drive. 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. It supports the initialization of USB drives of any capacity to popular file systems, such as NTFS, FAT32, FAT, and exFAT.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. ![]() ![]() It also offers nine industrial-strength data wipe options that securely wipe data on USB drives. In that case, USB Low-Level Format will help to revitalize your malfunctioning USB drive reliably.Īdditionally, USB Low-Level Format also features the ability to create a bootable USB drive for Windows installation, bootable USB drive for MSDOS, FreeDOS, Unix, Linux, WinPE (Windows PE), and WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment). Suppose you continually experience ongoing data corruption on your devices, including virus intrusion, invalid Master Boot Record, a hidden partition, corrupted bootable sector, or bad sectors flags in USB storage device firmware/controller. ![]() In other cases, the USB drive might lose capacity after it is formatted on yet a different device, such as a smart TV or a wireless router. USB Low-Level Format helps circumvent issues like when a USB flash pen drive contains less capacity than its original state the flash device might have less capacity after being cloned as a USB bootable drive from an ISO file. USB Low-Level Format supports numerous USB drive controller brands, such as Intel, Samsung, Micron, Phison, SMI, Marvell, Toshiba, Silicon Motion, PMC, Sierra, OCZ, JMicron, Maxiotek, Goke, Greenliant, Fusion-io, Realtek, SanDisk, Western Digital, Hyperstone, Novachips, VIA, and FADU. The low-level formatting process will be slow due to the app thoroughly and irreversibly erasing all data from USB storage devices, then restoring USB drives to their original state. It then analyzes the possible settings for the USB drive, like the physical storage capacity, talking to the firmware/controller of your USB drive, and writing a zero byte to its every location on the drive. ![]() USB Low-Level Format performs zero-fills for USB storage devices and simulates the factory finishing process. USB Low-Level Format lets you erase all data, flags, and settings on a USB utilizing a low-level format process. ![]()
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