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Date:      Mon, 08 Jul 2002 15:14:33 -0700
From:      Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive. 
Message-ID:  <200207082214.SAA11239@agamemnon.cnchost.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 08 Jul 2002 13:47:48 PDT." <Pine.BSF.4.21.0207081308410.29644-100000@InterJet.elischer.org> 

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> One of my FreeBSD development boxes had a hernia last week when it lost
> power while writing to disk. The drive wrote out garbage to a track.
> 
> I want to reformat the drive, (low level) but the bios doesn't have any
> support to do this (In the past That is how I did this).
> The machiine has 1 CD drive and no floppy..
> 
> anyone with any ideas as to how one can reformat a hard drive feel free to 
> lend me a clue..

Modern drives have low level formatting done at the "factory"
due to drives having multiple zones (different sectors/track
in each zone) and other horrible things done to sqeeze out
many more bits of storage.  They even retired the "FORMAT"
opcode from ATA standard!  I think your best bet may be to
see if you can find a windows program that will "reinit" the
disk.  Your disk's vendor may provide such a utility, usually
mislabelled "DiscWizard" or something for free.

I am ready for Millipede :-)

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