On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 07:23:28PM +1000, Amos Shapira wrote: > On 8/2/05, Yedidyah Bar-David > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I would still be interested in an answer to your question. > > I know (and used) such tools for SCSI disks, not IDE. > > Found it at grc.com. > See the reply to the question titled "Can SpinRite low-level format my > IDE, EIDE, or SCSI drive?" at http://grc.com/sr/faq.htm: > > "No software of any sort can truly low-level format today's modern > drives. The ability to low-level format hard drives was lost back in > the early 1990's..." > > They take 89$US for a copy of Spinrite. I suspect I'll buy this > after I recover from the recent unplanned purchases...
Well, you've pushed it enough to cause me to read parts of its site. It does seem like a nice tool. Not sure it's worth $89, though. All it seems to do is use brute-force and do very simple things. Many times that's all you want/need. I am yet to see any tool (or even documentation) that uses e.g. "IDE Taskfile Access" (IDE_TASK_IOCTL in linux). The only thing I know about it is what's written in the help for kernel config - google does not say much more, last time I asked. Not as a replacement (and even not very much related), you might want to look at dd_rescue and dd_rhelp. Also, reading spinrite's docs, a poor man's replacement might be to put in your crontab dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1024k to run every month or so, to let SMART replace bad sectors. -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
