Bob McGowan wrote:
Mark Allums wrote:
Bob McGowan wrote:
I have Maxtor IDE drives and Maxtor makes (or made, I got this some
time ago) a DOS based utility to do low level formats. Your disk
vendor probably has something similar available.
The Maxtor utilities will prep a drive, for those who can't be
bothered to use the native utilities for an OS, but I quite doubt that
an IDE was truly low-level formatted by it. The drive platters of
modern drives are low-level formatted before they are even assembled
into a working hard disk. They contain "embedded servo" information,
which can't be written by the read/write heads even if one wanted to.
Attempting to low-level format an IDE drive would only succeed in
permanently destroying the drive.
I am not a hardware expert, so I have to admit to using the terms
mentioned in the documentation or used by others in some way. This
usage may in fact be incorrect, for all I know.
However, there are others who speak about low level formatting of Maxtor
IDE drives:
http://www.ameriwebs.net/groupworks/george/maxtor.htm
Beyond this, since Maxtor is now part of Seagate, the setup of the web
page is different and a quick search did not bring up anything relating
to this.
I was not able (yet) to find the original download I did, only the exe
file on a floppy. When I find the related docs, I will post that.
Sorry, I was being a bit snarky, I guess. Not really called for. There
are three kinds of formatting. Low-level, fdisk, and OS-level.
Low-level used to need to be done for some reasons, such as to adjust
the sector interleave, or to switch the drive to a different physical
orientation (required with stepper motor head positioning). It is no
longer required to do it more than once, and it is always done at the
factory.
Fdisk, or partitioning, is not really formatting, but it is something
you do in the process of prepping a disk, so it is lumped together with it.
OS-level, or high-level, is done to create meta structure, like inodes,
or the FAT, etc. It can be done at any time.
Many OSes will do a "verify" of the whole partition. This is an attempt
to read every sector. It is not really part of formatting, and can be
done at any time. The goal is to find bad sectors, and mark them bad.
If there is any other kind of formatting, I am not aware of it.
--
Mark Allums
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
