From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jul 9 1:40:24 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 C2D7937B401 for ; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 01:40:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from freebsd.dk (cpe.atm2-0-56339.0x50c6aa0a.abnxx2.customer.tele.dk [80.198.170.10]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B44D343E42 for ; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 01:40:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sos@freebsd.dk) Received: (from sos@localhost) by freebsd.dk (8.12.2/8.12.2) id g698eDl3079385; Tue, 9 Jul 2002 10:40:13 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from sos) From: Soeren Schmidt Message-Id: <200207090840.g698eDl3079385@freebsd.dk> Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive. In-Reply-To: To: Julian Elischer Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 10:40:13 +0200 (CEST) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: sos@freebsd.dk X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL94b (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 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 It seems 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.. On modern disks you generally cannot do a lowlevel format (like in the old MFM & RLL days) although many disks will accept the command but will do absolutly nothing, well some will do a rescan for bad blocks.. Now if you want to get rid of "bad sectors" you should simply do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adX bs=1m and the disks *should* rewrite the sectors and remap them if they are really bad... -Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message