🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Bs9Fps.H5L@news.cso.uiuc.edu> berger@atropa (Mike Berger) writes:

 > For modern drives, neither SCSI nor IDE drives should be low-level
 > reformatted under most circumstances.  Since formatting is a
 > high-level SCSI feature, many drives are programmed to ignore a
 > reformat command (and return a status of ok) anyway.

For those (like myself) who prefer taking suggestions when they
understand the rationale behind them, one of the reasons that you should
not low-level format modern disk drives is that the external parameters
they exhibit (e.g. number of heads, tracks, sectors per track) often do
not match the actual internal specifications. (There are different
reasons why a manufacturer might want to "lie" to the outside world
about disk layout... they include reducing the apparent number of tracks
by increasing the apparent number of heads [to keep old BIOS's happy]
and increasing overall capacity by increasing the number of sectors per
track near the outside of the platters, but remapping so that apparently
all tracks have the same number, just that there are more of track
[again, this is to keep old BIOS's and software happy].)

In order to properly low-level format such disk drives (it can be done,
since the manufacturer's factory lines did it for you before they were
shipped out), you would need software very specific to each model.

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