From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Apr 25 13:14:55 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from lariat.lariat.org (lariat.lariat.org [206.100.185.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A85D137BA0A for ; Tue, 25 Apr 2000 13:14:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from brett@lariat.org) Received: from mustang.lariat.org (IDENT:ppp0.lariat.org@lariat.lariat.org [206.100.185.2]) by lariat.lariat.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA28571; Tue, 25 Apr 2000 14:14:37 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <4.3.1.2.20000425141125.00beb5e0@localhost> X-Sender: brett@localhost X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.1 Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 14:14:28 -0600 To: Terry Lambert From: Brett Glass Subject: Re: M$ anti-trust case Cc: adam@whizkidtech.net (G. Adam Stanislav), chat@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <200004251638.JAA02166@usr05.primenet.com> References: <4.2.2.20000418072728.04695100@localhost> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Terry: Steve needs lower level access to the hardware than that. He needs to be able to inspect the surface literally at the bit level and do low-level reformatting. The hardware of modern IDE drives often does not allow this; you can't do a low-level format at all. Worse still, many drives insist upon hiding their caching so that you cannot be sure when a write is committed to the surface of the disc. Kirk complained about this last fall at FreeBSDCon, and he's right. --Brett At 10:38 AM 4/25/2000, Terry Lambert wrote: > > >Wouldn't surprise me. Nevertheless, their "deep scan" is not as deep as > > >Steve's. His deepest scan not only refreshes the data, it reformats the > > >underlying hardware while doing it. > > > > He can only do this on MFM, RLL, and ESDI. He can't do it on SCSI or > > IDE, because they don't allow him direct access to the hardware. > >FYI, you can directly access the hardware by obtaining a level 3 >volume lock, then a level 1 volume lock, and then using a VXD to >directly manipulate the raw driver interfaces. > >It's actually pretty trivial, even for Windows programming. > >C.v. "Partition Magic" for one example of a product that does this. > > > Terry Lambert > terry@lambert.org >--- >Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present >or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message