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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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