CompuServe Messages

Michael, IDE drives aren't supposed to be low level formatted. If you ever managed to do it somehow, chances are you'd never be able to use it again! This is due to the fact that the drive uses "spare" tracks for its own purposes, and a low level format would destroy needed data. Many IDE drives have their "firmware" right on the disk, and the bootstrap ROM just knows how to access that track. Also, these drives are "self-repairing" – if they notice a bad track, they'll automatically swap in a spare track. That's why you never see a "bad sector" list with these drives – they're always "100% good" to the outside world. They keep track of bad and used spare tracks on another "spare" track. That is, of course, until major things start going wrong; if your drive is *suddenly* getting slow, you may be starting to get massive amounts of soft read errors (ones that go away). I'd put more money on it being caused by the drive's electronics (anything from head amp circuits to spindle speed control). I'd suggest backing it up IMMEDIATELY, 'cause it may outright fail at any time. If you hear the drive spinning up and down, this may indicate a spindle speed control or voltage regulation problem. This is probably the cheapest and easiest thing to fix (may just be an adjustment, and I guess it could be the main supply fluctuating, too). My Conner seems to be able to adjust its spindle speed control according to the input voltage; when I changed power supplies recently, the next time I powered it up it spun up and down about 5 times, then settled back in and hasn't done it since. Lastly, if this isn't something that just started happening, and instead just gradually got worse, you may simply have a badly fragmented drive. There is a VERY good shareware defragger called ReOrg (which I believe is in the libraries here) that does a great job of reorganizing the data on the disk to speed up access. There are also commercial programs which can be used; I have Ami-Back Tools, it doesn't say it will work with IDE drives, but it has helped me a couple of times, nonetheless. Honestly, IMHO, ReOrg is the fastest and best defragger to be found for the Amiga. It is worth every penny of the shareware fee. The only caveat I've heard of in using it is that it doesn't support one of the new cached FFS formats, perhaps someone else knows the exact situation there. I do know that the next rev of ReOrg is supposed to fix that. In ANY case, backing up the drive NOW can save you a LOT of pain and suffering later! // \X/ Amiga -Steve ——> On AutoPilot from Silicon Valley