Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 10:32:45 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Kent Stewart <kstewart@owt.com> Cc: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: offtopic: low level format of IDE drive. Message-ID: <20020709010245.GJ90012@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <3D2A0835.9000608@owt.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0207081308410.29644-100000@InterJet.elischer.org> <3D2A0835.9000608@owt.com>
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On Monday, 8 July 2002 at 14:46:29 -0700, Kent Stewart wrote: > Julian Elischer wrote: > >> 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.. I had this happen to me during some power fail testing about 18 months ago with an IBM IDE disk (forget the model number). On one such power fail, I lost something like 200 sectors. > 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. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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