🚀 go-pugleaf

jojo@world.net (Ellecer Valencia) wrote:

>i was doing an install of Office 95 recently, but i ran into some
>trouble and reset the machine and i ended up with 78 megs of bad
>sectors on my HD.  i tried all the things i had - scandisk, format,
>NDD - (no i didn't have norton for win95) but nothing worked. out of
>desperation, i found some disk utilities from a BBS and did a low
>level format on my hard drive.  it got rid of the bad sectors but i'm
>wondering if i did the format correctly.  the program i used was
>something called WDFMT (used by Western Digital) something..i'm pretty
>sure about most of the parameters i put in as i got them from the BIOS
>settings for my HD - the no. of cylinders, sectors, landing zone, etc.
>the only one i'm not sure of is the one called "precomp". my bios has
>65535 as the setting, while the program only allows 4 digits so i
>could only type in "5535".  after the lowlevel format, i repartitioned
>the thing, re-formatted and did scandisk and it seemed to be working
>fine.  but IS IT really OK? did i do the right thing? or is the HD
>just waiting to die on me a couple of wks from now??  what should i be
>checking/ doing?

>are there any online resources/ FAQs i should be looking up for
>detailed info on hard drives/ low level formats, etc??

>email replies would be best.  thanks!!


>ellecer

Relax, you should be ok.

Write precomp changes the timing on the innermost cylinders to get
better performance/read-write margins.  It is really used on older MFM
drives.  Since there were no settings on the drive, and since most IDE
drives don't need this, setting precomp at 65535 just is a convenient
number to turn it off.  Since there are not over 1024 cylinders on
your HD (at the most, 2000 just to it and the bios, and 1024 to DOS),
Any number bigger than the number of cylinders should be just fine.

To make yourself feel better about this, run a comprehensive surface
scan on the disk.  If it works well there, it should be reliable, and
barring anything real nasty happening to the hardware, should continue
to be reliable.  

BTW- WDFMT or its equivalent is the ONLY kind of low level format
utility you should use on an IDE drive.  IDE drives have varying
responses to an LLformat command, some ignore it, some try, some get
confused.  Early IDE drives (and maybe later ones) used a special
program to encode the LL format.  Mess this up, and you have real
problems.

Hope this helps

Harvey



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