Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 20:23:43 -0400 From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Kent Stewart <kstewart@owt.com>, Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive. Message-ID: <3D2CD00F.9729BA13@bellatlantic.net> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0207081308410.29644-100000@InterJet.elischer.org> <3D2A0835.9000608@owt.com> <20020709010245.GJ90012@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > On Monday, 8 July 2002 at 14:46:29 -0700, Kent Stewart wrote: > > All of the manufacturers have a program that will do that. Many of > > them even produce a bootable floppy. Check their support web page. > > I went looking for format utilities and didn't find anything. Finally > I stuck the disk in an old 486 with a format utility in the BIOS, and > that worked (fortunately the damage was below the 504 MB boundary :-). > > While looking at these format programs, I gained the distinct > impression that they didn't really format. The description was too > vague to make it clear just what they did do, though. Quite possibly > it's the same as dd if=/dev/zero, and it just relocates the logical > sectors. Once in 1996 I had a Western Digital IDE disk that developed bad sectors on it. Rewriting it (doing dd) did not help. The BIOS format did not help. But when I returned this disk to the dealer they ran some low-level format after which the errors were gone and the disk worked happily ever after. So apparently they are not the same. -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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