From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jul 8 18: 2:52 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A09C237B400 for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2002 18:02:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 55B3343E52 for ; Mon, 8 Jul 2002 18:02:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 2884A81711; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 10:32:45 +0930 (CST) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 10:32:45 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: Kent Stewart Cc: Julian Elischer , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive. Message-ID: <20020709010245.GJ90012@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <3D2A0835.9000608@owt.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3D2A0835.9000608@owt.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.99i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Monday, 8 July 2002 at 14:46:29 -0700, Kent Stewart wrote: > Julian Elischer wrote: > >> 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.. I had this happen to me during some power fail testing about 18 months ago with an IBM IDE disk (forget the model number). On one such power fail, I lost something like 200 sectors. > All of the manufacturers have a program that will do that. Many of > them even produce a bootable floppy. Check their support web page. I went looking for format utilities and didn't find anything. Finally I stuck the disk in an old 486 with a format utility in the BIOS, and that worked (fortunately the damage was below the 504 MB boundary :-). While looking at these format programs, I gained the distinct impression that they didn't really format. The description was too vague to make it clear just what they did do, though. Quite possibly it's the same as dd if=/dev/zero, and it just relocates the logical sectors. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message