CompuServe Messages

>> Actually, most of the time if I need to prep a drive, it's one of my SyQuest-270 carts, and I normally never low level format those anyway. I just partition it, write the RDB, and AmigaDOS format. << Yes, John! I don't lowlevel format drives just for fun either.. But sometimes a low-level format is the only way to "repair" a dead disk. It once happened to me that my Seagate Barracuda 2 gig drive suddendly died (well, actually I was a bit guilty on that.. I popped the SCSI connector in/out while power was on). It really was "dead as a doornail", and lowlevel format from HDToolBox didn't work. Then I tried to REALLY lowlevel format the beast by sending a SCSI Format Unit command. And – surprise! – it worked. It took very long, but the drive is now working as before. It didn't loose capacity either. Another reason to lowlevel format: Some SCSI drives do remap bad sectors "on the fly", or you can instruct them to reassign sectors. If sectors are reassigned and you do a lowlevel format now, some drives are clever enough to mark these sectors as bad. This means: The "bad" sector is not remapped to a spare sector, but the sector after the bad one will be the next block number. This reduces the seek overhead for accessing a bunch of sectors sectors with a "bad" one in the middle. Oliver