I can only speculate, but is it even possible to get the needed level of access to a CF card to do the things you're suggesting? The internal controller handles the low level stuff afaik, and just emulates/presents something looking like an IDE hard drive with a PC compatible low level format to the host controller. And why would they allow operations that no one ever will need to do when using the CF card the intended way, that potentially can brick it?

My guess of a worst case scenario is that nothing happens or the computer hangs. The card will definitely survive anyways 😀

Shall I give it a go then? Just to see what happens.

Well....
Before a low level format, it had some 200 kilobyte of bad sectors.
After a low level format, it had 0 bytes of bad sectors.

The computer never froze at any point.
I did not use the BIOS option for low level formatting.
I found some DOS tool for the job instead.

In other words... All that happened, was elimination of bad sectors.
At least that is what MS-Dos format tells me.
I can't say if this is a fix on CF cards with bad sectors on the long term.

Hah, cool! I'm astonished anything happened and there's any difference at all 😁

What happens if you power cycle the card? Still no bad sectors?

kaputnik wrote:

Hah, cool! I'm astonished anything happened and there's any difference at all 😁

What happens if you power cycle the card? Still no bad sectors?

1: Can't boot from the card.
2: It's a 32mb card.
3: I have just bought a new 32mb IDE+Flash compatible card from eBay...

Shure... Why not torture it a bit. 🤣
I think that I will start by cutting power to the PSU, while MS-Dos-6.22 is formatting it. 😁
Have to do it tomorrow. It's 2:12 am here in Denmark right now.

brostenen wrote:

1: Can't boot from the card. 2: It's a 32mb card. 3: I have just bought a new 32mb IDE+Flash compatible card from eBay... […]
Show full quote

kaputnik wrote:

Hah, cool! I'm astonished anything happened and there's any difference at all 😁

What happens if you power cycle the card? Still no bad sectors?

1: Can't boot from the card.
2: It's a 32mb card.
3: I have just bought a new 32mb IDE+Flash compatible card from eBay...

Shure... Why not torture it a bit. 🤣
I think that I will start by cutting power to the PSU, while MS-Dos-6.22 is formatting it. 😁
Have to do it tomorrow. It's 2:12 am here in Denmark right now.

Ah, meant power cycling it as in just shutting it down the usual way, and perhaps remove it a while from the adapter, just to be sure it's powerless, not pulling it while doing something on it 😀

Hehe, I'm actually in Denmark too, entered your territorial waters an hour or so ago 😁 I'm supposed to be awake despite the hour though, keeping the night engineering watch.

Tortured it a bit.... I started formatting it in MS-Dos-6.22 and cut the power at 10% completion.
Then I rebooted and removed the partition, created a new and formatted that.
This was with the parameters from the previous card, an 8mb CF-Card.
No bad sectors. So I went into the BIOS and redetected the card, and reformatted it.
Still no bad sectors. Well.... Then it struck me that I forgot to FDISK /MBR this card.
Removed the partition and rebooted. Then I sat up a new partition, formatted and did the
FDISK /MBR and yes. Now it boots... Stupid me.

So.... A low level format can possibly save a CF-Card from bad sector's, at least on the
short term. And the card can be tortured a bit, like cutting power and setting wrong parameters.

Run full SCANDISK on it or NDD with sector testing.

Scandisk tells no problem, need to dig out NDD and install it.