Re: Program to Low Level Format IDE drive

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#834

From: Candace O'Connor
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 22:03

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ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Iskandar Taib) writes:

>In article <1992Apr04.220959.1299@crash.cts.com> jimf@pro-woolf.cts.com (Jim Frost) writes:
>
>>Check out SpinRite, low-level format without having to backup the hard
>>drive.
>
>It doesn't work with IDE's. Or with SCSI's or anything that does
>sector translation. For the older MFM and RLL drives its great!

Sorry, but SpinRite is not "great" for older RLL drives.  Quoting from the
SpinRite ver 2.0 manual (pg 14):

"SpinRite may wisely refuse to perform actual low-level formatting on a
hard disk.  This most frequently occurs when RLL formatting has been
used to create 26 sectors per track even though the disk controller
reports having only an MFM formatted sector count of 17."

One of my computers fits this description. SpinRite would indeed not do
a low-level format of this disk.  

Candace O'Connor
Biology Department

h2co@odin.cc.pdx.edu

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From: h2co@odin.cc.pdx.edu (Candace O'Connor)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Program to Low Level Format IDE drive
Keywords: SpinRite
Message-ID: <5307@pdxgate.UUCP>
Date: 11 Apr 92 22:03:16 GMT
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