They are dead wrong.
There is nothing you can do to a drive in software besides reading or writing to it. Some manufacturers release various utilities like Maxtor's Acoustic Management, which communicates directly with the drive controller, but this is NOT what happens during a standard FORMAT operation.
You may be thinking of a true low level format.
What most people call "low level formatting" technically isn't. It just wipes every physical byte on the entire drive, destroying all logical and artificial structures (e.g. master boot record, partition tables, boot records, file allocation tables (FAT), data). This is sometimes necessary when a program has so corrupted the drive that FDISK refuses to repartition properly.
Low level formatting technically refers to a factory process called defect management, whereby the drive is scanned for the usual bad sectors that occur during production. Those sectors are mapped and recorded so that the drive never writes to them again. Currently, only IBM provides a true defect management utility for download, however you probably don't want to use it, since any newbad sectors on a warrantied drive is a sure sign it needs to be RMA'd.
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