On 26 September 2017 at 21:33, Phil Blundell via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Low-level formatting (which, at the time, was just called "formatting")
> used to be quite a routine operation on ST-506 MFM and RLL hard disks.
> They usually came completely blank from the factory and you had to
> format them according to whatever sector layout and interleave your
> particular controller wanted before they were usable.  Once the drive
> was formatted you then had to run a separate process to lay out an
> actual filesystem.
All true, although by the time I entered the industry in 1988 or so,
it was normal for drives to ship low-level formatted, at least.

I remember that Netware came with a special tool called COMPSURF to do
a "comprehensive surface analysis".

There's still a passing mention of this here:
https://support.novell.com/subscriptions/readmes/114.html

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