how to format an ide hard disc in a usb enclosure

[Julian Stacey]

Hi,
Reference:
> From:		"Alexander Sack" <pisymbol at gmail.com> 
> Date:		Thu, 4 Sep 2008 17:57:12 -0400 
> Message-id:	<3c0b01820809041457wc629c60i3b876b3895dc9e3d at mail.gmail.com> 

"Alexander Sack" wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Julian Stacey <jhs at berklix.org> wrote:
> > I know, hence the background, yes I'm fully aware of all repercusions thanks :-)
> 
> Then if you understand IDE, understand what a low-level format really
> is (was), then you know that this is probably NOT what you want to do
> on your disk and understand it will NOT fix your problem.
> 
> Other than some special vendor utility or BIOS utility, low-level
> format doesn't make sense for IDE disks.  There is no command for
> "format" and trying to reset the geometry like the old days doesn't
> even apply to modern disks.
> 
> If you want to try a low-level format tool (for IDE that is probably
> just writing 0's or 1's to every sector on the disk and letting the
> hard disk automatically map bad blocks), I would just dd all zero's to
> it then try to create a filesystem.  If you still get media errors,
> your disk is foobar or about to be foobar, its cheap and you already
> stated you don't have any critical data on it so buy a new disk!  :D
> 
> In fact Seagate offers a Windows too to do exactly this called ZeroFill:
> 
> http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=65a8783c970ce010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-GB
> 
> Not trying to be too cheeky here, but I think what you are asking
> doesn't makes sense...at least to me....
> 
> Thanks!

I do not run Windows, I run FreeBSD.
Repeat: How can I low level format this dik under FreeBSD ?

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey: BSDUnixLinux C Prog Admin SysEng Consult Munich www.berklix.com
  Mail plain ASCII text.  HTML & Base64 text are spam. www.asciiribbon.org