Heh .. If the posts in General Discussion hadnt pruned you'd have found my old posts ...
Formatting a drive cannot and doesnot do any harm to the hard disk .. Format program actually recreates the File Allocation Table that is the address of files, sectors alloted to them and all that .. It does not touch the media so no question of any harm . ..
Now what people normally refer to as low level format .. They are actually referring to Zero Fill .. What this program does is to initialize all the sectors of hard drive to zero .. so the data is wiped away .. This is time consuming process as each and every sector is read and write .. Bad sectors can be found here (Found and not created) as if some part of drive doesnt respond in the manner it should, it is marked as bad sector .. So the program doesnt do anything to the physical media ..