Kinda makes you wonder what reason would he have to low level format an active harddrive. Nothing more dangerous to do short of hammering a nail through the hd.
Well, the term "low-level" is a bit misused now days, but if you mean in terms of writing zeros, it's often done specifically so that information cannot be recovered. I don't think we can actually do low-level work on hard drives anymore, I'm pretty sure that's all done at the factory now that the controllers are built into the hard drive. Literal low-level formats were done back in the days when the controllers were on the motherboards, so the hard drive had to be formatted to work that with specific controller.
But like he said, he didn't mean to do the drive he did. Honest mistake, it happens (I've done it...
). I'm not sure what you mean by dangerous though (unless you are thinking of the literal use of low-level format), writing zeros is no more dangerous to the drive than just changing the flags in the MFT, it just takes more time.
