From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Feb 18 13:55:33 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from allegro.lemis.com (allegro.lemis.com [192.109.197.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E72CB10E58 for ; Thu, 18 Feb 1999 13:55:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by allegro.lemis.com (8.9.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id IAA22272; Fri, 19 Feb 1999 08:25:22 +1030 (CST) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id IAA18317; Fri, 19 Feb 1999 08:25:20 +1030 (CST) Message-ID: <19990219082520.N14890@lemis.com> Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 08:25:20 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: Kent Stewart , Riccardo Veraldi Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: HOW to format ? References: <36CC3F61.91EB4912@3-cities.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i In-Reply-To: <36CC3F61.91EB4912@3-cities.com>; from Kent Stewart on Thu, Feb 18, 1999 at 08:27:13AM -0800 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thursday, 18 February 1999 at 8:27:13 -0800, Kent Stewart wrote: > Years ago, Riccardo Veraldi wrote: >> >> Hello, >> ther is any tool for FreeBSD to allow low level formatting of an hard >> drive ???? or simple a formatting tool for hard drive ?? >> thanks a lot. > > Low Level Formating is a function of the type of hard drive and the > manufacturer. The manufacturer's have utilities to do LLF. There are tools > to do LLF on SCSI but you should visit the manufacturer's web site for your > IDE. Western Digital has a tool called WDDiag that does it from a DOS boot > floppy. For WD disks you do a "write zeros" to the disk, which is their > equivalent of a low level format. This is only partially correct. Nearly all SCSI disks obey the `format' command, which you can issue via the scsiformat(8) or camcontrol(8) commands. FreeBSD doesn't supply a tool for formatting IDE disks, but every BIOS does. This means that you'll have to shut down the system, which is a nuisance, but you don't need to install Diagnostic Operational Support. Formatting involves a whole lot more than writing zeros to the disk. It writes the sector headers as well, and the pattern that it writes is designed to be relatively difficult to read, so that the verification pass can catch flaky sectors. You almost never need to reformat a disk. This is a Microsoftism. FreeBSD reports disk I/O errors, so you should know when a format is needed. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message