On 9/27/17 12:04 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
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
Everyone forgets Norton Utilities...
