Can you format a hard drive from within the BIOS?

[Gizmo]

Hey guys,

I had a conversation with a friend of mine and we were talking about all the possible ways to format a hard drive. My friend said to me that you can format a hard drive from within the BIOS. Is this true? If so, how do you do it?

TIA

[Panama Red]

That's a new one on me. Guess I'll see if anyone else posts a method to do this. Only ways I know to format a hard drive are with a boot disk (floppy), a bootable Operating System CD, or from within Windows if you need to format additional partitions or an additional hard drive.

[Cricket]

Formatting a hard drive from within the BIOS? I've never heard of that before either. Was your friend maybe thinking of formatting from a bootable floppy disk instead? I've never seen anything in any BIOS I've worked with that will allow you to format a hard drive from within the BIOS.

Cricket

[Gizmo]

Aaah, ok. It seems my friend might have been bluffing but that's not unusual to me lol. He either explains things wrong or he's just plain lieing. But anyway, I did a google search with the question "Where is the option to format a hard drive in the BIOS?" and it came up with a few things. I selected a link to view a forum conversation and one guy mentioned a low level format option being seen in the BIOS, but then he also added that it's been a long time since he's seen that option and only ever appears in very old BIOS's. There's one thing I do remember though, we once had someone over to sort out one of our older machines, an AMD mid-tower running Windows ME. I remember peering over the person's shoulder and seeing a blue screen with a yellow bar across it right in the centre, the bar was at about 50% when I realised he was formatting the harddrive. I just remember seeing the blue screen with the yellow bar and was dead sure that he was doing it from the BIOS. Anyways, thanks PR and Cricket Oh and one very quick question, what's the command you can use to view, create, delete and modify partitons in XP? Is it fdisk? Or do you just use the OS disk to do it? Thanks again

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by DBG Oh and one very quick question, what's the command you can use to view, create, delete and modify partitons in XP? Is it fdisk? Or do you just use the OS disk to do it? Thanks again

You use Disk Management from within WinXP.

Fdisk is used for Win9x based operating systems...it can't see NTFS partitions.

Cricket

[Gizmo]

Oooh yeah, because it's FAT32. I remember now. Lol sorry, I just needed to be reminded. Plus, fdisk is a DOS command and XP isn't DOS, so it wouldn't work anyway. Just remembered that part aswell. Lol I need waking up. Thanks Cricket

[edfair]

Some hard drive controllers allow low level formatting from their BIOS settings. And if you didn't know what was native and what was attached you would think it was native.
And there were motherboards with the capability several years ago but I haven't seen one in probably 5 years. Think they were 486s.

[ComputerNut]

Actually I think I saw once on the BIOS of a system I was working on "Fill Drive with Zeros". I guess a rare breed of BIOS programs have this, that my imagination is playing dumb with me.

CN

[doctorgonzo]

You can't "low level format" a modern hard disk. What you can do is zero-fill them, which is what people may mean these days by "low level format". That is why you haven't seen any motherboards with that option in a long time; that option no longer exists.

I have never heard of formatting a drive from the BIOS. A bootdisk certainly, a Windows install disk yes, but not the BIOS. It is hard to see how this would be possible anyway: there are a lot of file systems out there, and either the BIOS format could only do a couple (like FAT32), or it would be huge to cover all file systems. Linux by itself has a bunch of file systems to choose from, it would be crazy for a motherboard maker to put a program in the BIOS to format all the file systems available in Linux.

[Force Flow]

Not even a RAID BIOS controller formats the HDDs when it synchs them up. You either have to format through DOS, in windows setup, windows disk management, or some other tool (ie partition magic).

[spyder003]

Originally Posted by Force Flow Not even a RAID BIOS controller formats the HDDs when it synchs them up. You either have to format through DOS, in windows setup, windows disk management, or some other tool (ie partition magic).

You can do it with an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe. It has an option in the RAID setup to Zero Fill a drive.

Edit - nevermind, still no option to format it.