Low-Level Formatting: Seagate Drives

SEAGATE HARD DRIVES

By George Snell

Caution! A low-level format will "data scrub" all the sectors. This may be the only way to delete a corrupted partition record or remove a particularly stubborn virus. If programs like Scandisk have detected new bad sectors, SGATFMT4.EXE is able to find and lock out the offending sectors, provided the defect is not in the ID portion of the sector. When you hi-level format, the sector will be found again and indicated as "bytes in bad sectors" at the conclusion.

Seagate has several useful utilites, found at http://www.seagate.com/support/index.html

SGATFMT4.EXE is a low-level formatting program that should only be used with Seagate drives. If you have trouble locating it on the Seagate site, download here
You can open it with WinZIP, PKUnzip, or some similar program.

Here is a brief overview of the text file, with some additional comments:

The program may be used with 286/386/486 and Pentium systems. Do not use it with an XT system.
It will work on IDE systems. Since it was originally designed to work with MFM and RLL drives, some instructions will not apply.
SGATFMT4.EXE does not use the BIOS, so it is not necessary to identify your hard drive in the CMOS to low level format.
The hard drive to be formatted must be on the primary controller! It may be the master or slave drive. Unless you are a glutton for punishment, and like losing all your valuable data, remove all hard drives from your computer except the one you want to format.
I recommend doing all formatting from a bootable floppy diskette.
When formatting your drive, I recommend choosing Option 4 (Format/Verify drive). If bad sectors are found, they will be accurately mapped without losing the entire cylinder. Note that large drive will take several hours to format.
Newer IDE hard drives will not have Options 2 (Enter Defects) or 6 (Optimize Interleave) available. This is because you are formatting in Translation Mode, thereby maintaining the factory-mapped defects and head skew.
If you are formatting early IDE drives (normally 144 meg. or less), read about head skew. You will see that you will lose head skew settings, thereby slowing drive data transfer rates substantially. (You will probably opt for another program, such as Ontrack's Disk Manager if doing one of these old drives).
If you are formatting drives such as ST-1239A or ST-1201A, use some kind of drive translation mode to preserve factory defect mapping and head skew (typically 144 to 250 Mb hard drives).

If you are using Ontrack's Disk Manager to low-level format your Seagate Hard Drive, see the Ontrack section of the file for general formatting procedures.