🚀 go-pugleaf

dtrg@st-andrews.ac.uk (David Thomas Richard Given) wrote:

>Modern IDE drives should NEVER be low-level formatted (besides, to do 
>this, you need dedicated hardware).

Right, David, I think Western Digital would second that.

Wrt David Longley's original post (prior to this thread) and his WDC
drive, I responded earlier today via direct email.  I'll post the
gist of what I sent him, as it may help clear up some of the
confusion in earlier posts.  The text below comes from a WDC web
page.  The utilities described can be had via WDC's web site and FTP
site (obviously, free of charge, but likely of little interest unless
you have a WD drive).  WDC has additional stuff available at its FTP
site, but I suspect the two utilities WD has named their All-Star
package is what he needs.  If his HD is *really* physically fubar,
we'll hope the warrenty is still good ... or that maybe WDC is still
filled with holiday cheer.  <g> 

All-Star Utilities
    SIZE: 122K
All-Star utilities file contains two of our most popular utilities:
WDATIDE.EXE, our Defect Manager and WD_CLEAR.EXE which is our pseudo
low-level formatter. These files can also be downloaded individually
from this page. 

WDATIDE.EXE
    SIZE: 101K
This utility scans the media and remaps any grown defects on a
Western Digital drive. It also provides performance data such as seek
times and data access times. 

WD_CLEAR.EXE
    SIZE: 52 K
This utility contains WDCLEAR.EXE which will verify read/write to the
entire hard drive. Specifically, this utility is used to scan the
drive for errors and to re-initialize the drive (i.e. a pseudo
low-level formatter). This utility replaces WDFMT.EXE on Caviar
drives.
--
Cheers, John
[mail]
Internet=jcnaylor@nando.net
AmericaOnline=jcnaylor@aol.com    (by appointment only)