🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <820615882snz@longley.demon.co.uk>
           David@longley.demon.co.uk "David Longley" writes:

" I  have  a Western Digital "Caviar" 500MB Hard  drive  which  has 
" about 10MB of bad blocks. I'd prefer to be able to exclude  these 
" altogether  through a low level format. Are there  any  utilities 
" around which will do this? Any Public Domain ones anyone could e-
" mail me?

    Other things being equal, as another post has pointed out, you
 don't need software to do this.  If you use DEBUG to start the
 control program which is situated at +5 bytes from the load-point of
 your disk-controller's BIOS, you'll get straight into the low-level
 formatter, and it will be the correct one for the HDC in question.

    I've formatted quite a lot of IDEs, for reasons which were good at
 the time.  You ought to know the drive's configuration (heads,
 cylinders, sectors/track, possibly write-comp & landing-zone).
 If you put these in as different from reality, everything goes ahead
 quite happily but you end up with a drive which has a theoretical
 'shape' different from its real shape, which does not usually matter
 (though it may affect performance).  If the theoretical size is less
 than reality, you've abandoned the extra; if it's greater, then all
 the sectors which are "off the end" will be bad, and normal formatting
 will take a LONG time!

    Problem areas:  Auto-sensing of the drive parameters will (probably)
 still pick up the real shape, and sometimes the boot won't work if
 you've altered the shape.

    BUT:  What are you trying to achieve?  The sectors will probably
 still be bad.  If they were marked bad in error, a normal format will
 cure it.
                                            Chris K.
-- 
Chris Kennington        <==x  <==x  <==x         cjk@inf-eden.demon.co.uk
Eden Cottage, Mays Green, Harpsden, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon. RG9 4AJ.  U.K.
Tel: +44 1491 574065                                 Fax: +44 1491 410064