[ivi0nk3y]

Originally Posted by Odin

If I understood you, then I would suggest doing a complete erasure of the drive. Most of the time the operating system's built in tools are insufficient to do this properly. I suggest one of the following utilities:

• Samsung Hutil (The Drive Diagnostic Utility) - This is made available by Samsung to diagnose and repair their hardware.
  
  SAMSUNG Hard Disk Drive - support - utilities

• Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") - This is the tool I use for such situations.
  
  Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe

Both of these utilities need to be copied to a CD/DVD, floppy disk, or USB memory stick. They are both have thierown OS and the system needs to boot to the programs in order to work.

*** WARNING: These are powerful untilites. ***
*** Anything you erase with them can not be restored!!! ***

Well these programs would work because they are used to low lever format a harddrive. However that is only necessary when data is needed to be Zero'd or Nullified totally on a HD. For instance, if a hard drive is going to be sold to a third party and has been used, it needs to be Zero Filled so that data can't be brought back up, since it is never fully deleted.
Therefore, I don't think a low-level format would do anything different than any other type of format would, other than being able to do it outside of an OS.
I really think there is something wrong with the hard drive itself and its ability to retain information.

Then again, you could be right and I could be totally wrong too.