In message <Pine.sol.3.90.951018115558.27183A-100000@borg>,Valtteri Vuorikoski 
writes:
> SCSI drives should know how to low-level format themselves.
><kg> "Thank you for using me. It is my pleasure to low-level format 
>myself."

Right, actually a big part of writing a low-level formatting tool is
waiting around for the disk to say "hey i'm done" which is actually a
problem when formatting really large drives (like the newer 9G drives)
since they take so long to format, some formatting utilities think the
format has failed (due to a timeout)

However, to do a low-level format I would actually have to send some
low-level scsi commands and that would not be as easy as just tinkering
with the couple of blocks at the beginning of the disk.

does anyone have a generic 'scsi driver' implementation that could be used
in a formatting utility?  what would one actually need to do?