Most drives these days will notice when you try to write to a failing/failed sector, and remap it to one of their internal spare sectors. So yeah, if a low-level format ends up writing to all the sectors, it could totally fix a drive. Of course, by that measure you can just go through the drive, reading each sector then writing it back - that way you only lose the sectors that are actually failing, which is generally a small (but almost always non-zero, even on a working drive) number.
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Date: 2009-01-23 01:44 pm (UTC)