@Atheist

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A little story on hardware history may be in order here. I'm quietly assuming you are not aware of what "formatting" a hard disk drive means today, so please forgive me if I'm repeating common knowledge.

Let's say the year is 1987: you've got a blank floppy disk and a hard disk controller attached to a brand new 20 MByte hard disk drive which you brought home from the shop. You want to make both usable for your Amiga. What you need to do for that is format them.

The floppy disk needs to be formatted because since it came out of the factory, nobody stored any information on it. The hard disk drive needs to be low-level formatted using the hard disk partitioning tool, because since the day the hard disk drive came out of the factory nobody stored any information on it either.

In both cases you are really low-level formatting a magnetic storage medium. And in both cases the low-level formatting process did something to the respective storage medium which helped the respective disk controllers to access the data. It organized the storage medium, breaking it down into tracks, blocks and sectors, which is something the disk controller hardware can't do all by itself. It needs the low-level formatting to (so to speak) draw chalk lines around the individual storage units.

So, low-level formatting helps the hardware make sense of the storage medium. The next following step would be to help the software, typically a file system which needs to know where partitions begin and end, make sense of the storage medium. This is what the Amiga "HDToolbox" and "Format" commands will do.

Please keep in mind that these two steps (low-level formatting is needed by the disk controller, partitioning and formatting is needed by the file system) always used to be necessary in around 1985/1987 for magnetic storage media.

Times change: flash forward to 2007, some twenty odd years later. While formatting floppy disks still works almost exactly like it did in 1987 (the technology is so old/robust that it doesn't change with the times) something happened to how hard disk drives work. For a start, we now have much larger hard disks than we used to have, and they are much cheaper, too.

What made these cheaper, much larger hard disks possible was (among other things) a change in how data is recorded on the storage medium. You no longer have to give the hard disk controller hardware hints as to how the disk is structured. The manufacturer takes care of that before the disk is even shipped to you. Consequently, you can only partition the hard disk and format the partitions, a low-level format is no longer possible or even necessary.

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No, it's not necessary. What the partitioning software does is limited to writing the partitioning scheme to the disk, which puts a certain structure on the disk. This process merely changes what's stored on the disk, and no previously existing disk structure will prevent the process from succeeding. This is not like it used to be in 1987 for floppy disks formatted on an IBM system which had to be reformatted on the Amiga to be useful. Today's hard disks are always in low-level formatted state.

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Right idea, but merely putting a new partitioning scheme on the disk and then formatting each partition with the "Quick" option will do the job. There is no need to erase the information previously stored on the disk first.

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In 1987 cutting the power while your hard disk's read/write head was still accessing the medium could result in mechanical damage. Today's hard drive mechanics are safer, and you need physical force (like throwing or dropping a drive) to cause damage. You should be safe by merely rebooting the machine.

Once the machine restarts, pick up where you left off: set up a partitioning scheme, write it to disk, then format the individual partitions. Don't use the blanking/wiping process.

@Atheist

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There really ought to be a progress bar and an option to cancel the operation because, well, it will take a long time to complete. Seven write passes are made for each block, and since each write access has to change the data on the disk no write cache is going to speed up the process.

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This is primarily going to cost you time. I don't know how exactly into how much money this translates, though...

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Well, that's a bit long :-/

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So you have the slowest disk access method possible, on a really large disk, for which each block is rewritten seven times over, and each write operation results in a disk access which does not go through the write cache. Ouch. There really should be a "Cancel" button and a progress display in the partitioning tool.

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Since you were trying to low-level format the drive anyway, what's the harm of rebooting the machine? It's not as you'd lose any data.

Incidentally, the "blanking" option was intended to make the data on the drive unrecoverable before you sell it or throw it away. It's not particularly useful in any other situation.