HardFrame Question
3 messages in this thread
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
Ariel,
I wrote such a test program, should be in LIB 11 of TEch as
HDTest.lzh. It was originally designed to test HD's for unmapped defects
but as it turns out…it seems to work with any block oriented device.
It works at the device level…so if the device driver can read
non-DOS sectors…(most HD controllers/host adapters can) it'll work once
low-level formatted. It can also be used to verify a current drive (or
floppy disk) is still valid. It's completely non-destructive, does only
reads…no writes to the device.
Don
Don,
Actually, HDtest.LZH is now in LIB 9 (Disk Utilities) here in User. 8^)
I just DL'd it after reading your message.
-Dave-