>A while back I bought a Maxtor 13gig IDE drive for a desktop Mac. One of the
>warning I got from someone was not to do a low-level format of the drive as
>this could render it "unseeable" by the Mac. Seem like it wipes out drivers
>or does something to block zero but I can't recall exactly as it's been a
>while.
>
>That warning just sticks in my mind about not doing a low level format on an
>IDE drive that is not made specifically for the Mac.
>
>You may need to find someone with a Windoze laptop and have them reformat
>it. Then put it back in your PowerBook and initialize it as described above.
This is simply not true. A driver installer utility (Drive Setup,
HDT, Anubis, etc) can see the drive if it's present and functioning;
it doesn't need a driver or any particular contents. Indeed, that's
the whole point. The Finder can't see any disk volumes until the disk
is partitioned by one of those utilities, though. Drive Setup itself
"wipes out drivers and does something to block zero".
Second, there is no way to do a low-level format on an IDE drive -
the drive has no concept of it (unlike a SCSI drive). This is why the
option is dimmed in Drive Setup. The most you can do is write zeros
to every block, which is probably a waste of time unless you've just
bought a new blank drive and want to test it for bad blocks (and
there are better ways to do that too). Drive Setup will always
rewrite any or all of block zero, the partition table, and the
contents of the driver partitions when you do something to the disk
anyway.
Offhand it sounds like Laurent's disk has simply kicked the bucket.
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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