On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Don Lewis wrote: > On 8 Jul, Peter Wemm wrote: > > Julian Elischer wrote: > >> this is not a 'reformat' > >> > >> what I want to do is an old-fashionned refomat/verify where the controller > >> writes new track headers etc. > > > > The thing is, just about all IDE drives more than a few GB or so do 'track > > writing' and have no fixed sectoring or sector positioning. ie: each time > > you write a single sector to a track, it does a read-modify-write of *THE > > ENTIRE TRACK*. This is why we have to have write caching turned on for IDE > > drives to get decent performance. Without it, it essentially rewrites the > > entire track over and over and over again because it cannot fill its write > > buffer in order to write a contiguous block to completely replace what was > > there before. ie: each track is one giant physical sector with multiple logical > > sectors inside it. > > > > The really annoying thing is that most newer scsi drives do this too. > > How readily available is the information about which drives do this? As > someone who only buys the occasional drive, I'd rather not have to buy > one and do the evaluation myself using the method mentioned later in > this thread. > > > > Get a UPS if you value the data. :-] > > That doesn't help if the cat knocks a book off the shelf onto the power > switch, or if you trip over the cord between the UPS and the computer, > or if the magic smoke escapes from the computer power supply.
I've seen some BIOSes that allowed you to force the low-level format. Alternatively, you could run an old copy of dos that had "debug" on it and tell it to "g c800:0" which was the address of the disk ROM routine; it worked very reliably for me (before I learned about scsi disks!) > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include C & Java programming, FreeBSD, [EMAIL PROTECTED] | electronics, communications, and signal processing. New Year's Resolution: I will not sphroxify gullible people into looking up fictitious words in the dictionary. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
