john_markanich Posted April 30, 2008 Share Posted April 30, 2008 My Canon G9 offers two choices when formatting a memory card; "Format" and "Low Level Format". The manual does not explain what the difference is other than to "Low Level Format" a card when the recording/reading speed drops. Can anyone offer some insight into this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed_Ingold Posted April 30, 2008 Share Posted April 30, 2008 In computer terms, the normal "format" operation simply clears each file start position in the FAT (the "directory" of the card). None of the data is erased, but can be written over by new images. You can generally recover data "lost" by this type of format, provided you haven't written anything else to the card. If a block is not addressed by the FAT, you can have segments of files which may corrupt other files in usage. A low level format is probably not as low as in a computer (where sector address are re-written), but at least writes over every segment and clears the FAT completely. In addition, a low level format probably looks for bad blocks and maps around them in the FAT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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