From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jul 10 17:23:53 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 D428137B400; Wed, 10 Jul 2002 17:23:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from out003.verizon.net (out003pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.103]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 21E9F43E09; Wed, 10 Jul 2002 17:23:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from babkin@bellatlantic.net) Received: from bellatlantic.net ([138.89.159.156]) by out003.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.05 201-253-122-126-105-20020426) with ESMTP id <20020711002345.BHDQ25984.out003.verizon.net@bellatlantic.net>; Wed, 10 Jul 2002 19:23:45 -0500 Message-ID: <3D2CD00F.9729BA13@bellatlantic.net> Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 20:23:43 -0400 From: Sergey Babkin X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.0-19990626-CURRENT i386) X-Accept-Language: en, ru MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey Cc: Kent Stewart , Julian Elischer , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive. References: <3D2A0835.9000608@owt.com> <20020709010245.GJ90012@wantadilla.lemis.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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 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