

When you encounter constant data corruption, virus intrusion within the MBR or bad sectors. The other two are partitioning and high-level formatting. Low level formatting is only one of the three processes of formatting a disk for use by an operating system and its applications.

This is intended to be the permanent foundation of the disk, and is often completed at the factory.

Low-level formatting (i.e., closest to the hardware) marks the surfaces of the disks with markers indicating the start of a recording block (typically today called sector markers) and other information like block CRC to be used later, in normal operations, by the disk controller to read or write data.
