CompuServe Messages

Bob: Right, right, I've seen this too. We've never been sure about exactly how to make allowance for the spare blocks required by nearly every SCSI drive. What we usually do is do a long format until it fails on a track, then note the track number and use it for the "Last Cyl" parameter. This seems to be considerably easier than trying to fit the total number of available blocks to a "nominal" sectors per track number (especially with zoned recording) and then estimating a percentage to leave free. The problem I was trying to address was more a "how to get up and running while figuring out what is wrong" type problem. It seems to me that once the drive is DOS formatted, there are one or two programs available to do I/O to every allocated block in order to test drive integrity (didn't Larry write one?). Dan could try this to see if the problem was with the DOS format program, or with the drive. Ariel