Consumer 'low level formatting' was possible with ST506 and ESDI drives, not SCSI or ATA.

Nor, btw, can you 'low level format' a SATA or PATA ('IDE') drive. There are just aren't any commands in the USB mass storage class to request a low level format. Sorry, but you can't 'low level format' a USB drive. (But usually not the partition table, as the scumbags who made these things were clever enough to not re-use the first few blocks.) In normal use the symptom is that when you put 'too much' data on the drive, the file system metadata becomes corrupt. But if you try to also read data you wrote earlier, you'll get data that you wrote later, even though you thought they were being written to different sectors.

And if you read back the data you just wrote, that'll work too, because reads to non-existent space are mapped to the same actual blocks as the writes were. But they do allow writes to the non-existent space to succeed. They do not exactly wrap around as this would soon corrupt the MBR and the partition table in block 0, resulting inj Windows complaining that the drive needs to be formatted. Writes to all reported sectors will apparently succeed, so the /P option does not help.Īs Bob said in a previous comment, these drives re-use the same blocks over and over again. Formatting will neither tell you the drive's true capacity nor set its reported capacity to the actual.

Fakeflashtest