Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 22:13:15 -0700 From: Cy Schubert - CITS Open Systems Group <Cy.Schubert@uumail.gov.bc.ca> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@icir.org>, Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive. Message-ID: <200207090513.g695DFfP078057@cwsys.cwsent.com> In-Reply-To: Message from Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> of "Mon, 08 Jul 2002 18:40:05 PDT." <3D2A3EF5.9BAAE12A@mindspring.com>
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In message <3D2A3EF5.9BAAE12A@mindspring.com>, Terry Lambert writes:
> Julian Elischer wrote:
> > According to the specs I had access to at Whistle they were pretty much
> > the same low level device with different interface logic.
> > The ATA drives I have seen had a format capacity
> > just like their scsi cousins, just hard to find.
>
> Actually, if you read through the thread, you will see the format
> track was taken out of the ATA specification. You have to know a
> magic incantation to talk to the drive firmware (hence my vendor
> tool recomendation, and my question "Who is the manufacturer?").
That is understandable. For example, Western Digital has not supported
a real format track command since as far back as 1991. The WDAC-280
documentation states that the drive supported a logical format command
that would fill existing sectors with zeros. It also supported marking
sectors bad to provide backward compatibility with older MFM drives.
IIRC, the old IDE specification stated that vendor implementation of
the IDE format track command was at the discretion of the vendor. The
command could format a track, zero out a track, or do nothing.
Using the vendor's supplied utilities to format and mark bad sectors is
always recommended.
--
Cheers, Phone: 250-387-8437
Cy Schubert Fax: 250-387-5766
Team Leader, Sun/Alpha Team Email: Cy.Schubert@osg.gov.bc.ca
Open Systems Group, CITS
Ministry of Management Services
Province of BC
FreeBSD UNIX: cy@FreeBSD.org
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