Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2001 13:12:43 +0100 (CET) From: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> To: Scott Mitchell <scott.mitchell@mail.com> Cc: David Loszewski <stealth215@mediaone.net>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: harddrive error Message-ID: <20011118130628.Q935-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net> In-Reply-To: <20011118115024.I272@localhost>
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On Sun, 18 Nov 2001, Scott Mitchell wrote: > BTW, the drive tester may well offer to do some kind of low-level format on > the drive to 'repair' it. This may well appear to work, but if my > experience is anything to go by, a genuinely bad drive will just start > failing again soon after, so I wouldn't bother. Low-level format, especially if done with tools and procedures not explicitly recommended by the manufacturer, can be a risky thing. In general, it should not be neccessary to do a low level format on modern drives (in fact, a few years back there used to be a low-level format utility present in many BIOSes, which is no longer the case) - if the need arises, it is well possible that something else and much more serious is about to fail. If you do a low-level format wrong, the "bad blocks" on your HDD that were already marked as bad in the factory or during your use of the drive will be made available for data storage again. A proper low-level format tool from your manufacturer should properly handle this and make sure that these blocks remain marked as bad. A wrong tool may, however, make these bad blocks available for data storage again. This means that your problems may be gone for a short time, until your HDD has tried to store some data on these bad blocks, after which it will complain again, and everything will start all over again... Nils Holland Ti Systems - FreeBSD in Tiddische, Germany http://www.tisys.org * nils@tisys.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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