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Date:      Tue, 9 Jul 2002 10:28:28 -0400
From:      Bill Vermillion <bv@wjv.com>
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   low level format of an IDE drive
Message-ID:  <20020709142828.GC1723@wjv.com>
In-Reply-To: <bulk.47425.20020709051543@hub.freebsd.org>
References:  <bulk.47425.20020709051543@hub.freebsd.org>

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Knocking over a stack of dishes in the heat sink freebsd-hackers-digest
wondered out loud about:

> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 14:08:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
> Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive.
> 

> :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..

>    Two things:

>     (1) dd if=/dev/zero of=<raw_device> bs=32k 

>  This will force the drive to reassign broken sectors. Run this
>  command twice. If the second run of the command is successful
>  and does not stall (looking at running 'iostat 10' output will
>  tell you whether it stalled) then you are golden.
>
>  Use the base device for the dd output file, e.g. like        .
>  '/dev/ad0' Do not specify a slice or a partition             .

>     (2) If the command fails for any reason other then hitting
>  the end of the media, or if it stalls on the second go-around,
>  throw the drive away and buy a new one.

Not neccesarily true.   I picked up some as-is where-is drives.  
MS's fdisk would take hours trying to map out bad spots, failures
galore.

I got the manufacturers format disk and these came back as if they
never had a problem.  Disks are available for Western Digital,
Seagate, and Maxtor.  I've found no others.

I had a install on FreeBSD go astry because of an old-bios and
could not get anything to work.  It was a brand new warranted
drive.  Manufacturer 'recertify' - one of the options on the Maxtor
disk - made everything lovely again.

For SCSI problems I have access to an SGI and their low-level SCSI
utility is wonderful - commercial version at hundreds.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

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