🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin@Computer.com wrote:

: I did a low level format of an IDE drive a friend gave me.  It is a 
: conner 120 meg IDE drive.  After that I partitioned it and did a DOS 
: format, and it all worked.  Or appeared to.  Then I ran double space, 
: which gave me a message about an 'unrecoverable' error - and now I cannot 
: access the drive at all - not with Super-Stor, not with fdisk, nothing!  
: Have I killed my drive somehow?  Is it bad to do a low level format of an 
: IDE?

Bad?  That's an understatement.

The manufacturer may reformat it for you, for a fee.  You could try some 
of the data recovery companies to see what it would cost.  Chances are 
the cost of reformatting will be more than the disk is worth.

What happens is that the I in IDE stands for Intelligent.  (The drive, 
not the user <vbg>.)  The PHYSICAL drive configuration (cylinders, 
sectors, etc.) is not important to us, and most often, not even 
DOS-like.  The drive intelligence translates the physical drive into 
something DOS can recognize.  "What about the drive parameters we're given 
with the drive manuals", you ask?  These are simply the optimal 
parameters to get the most useable space from the drive - not the real 
parameters that are hidden by the intelligent part of the drive.  You 
can high-level format any IDE drive using ANY combination of DOS 
heads/sectors/tracks parameters that compute to the total capacity of the 
IDE drive, or less.

When you low-level format an IDE drive, you made some assumptions about 
the drive parameters which are not real.  The LL Format dutifully wrote 
track/sector allocation ID's to the disk.  Problem is, the physical disk 
isn't formatted this way.


-- 
Stephen Mann <smann@rahul.net>