>Yes you can!
>Using Fdisk on and PC will do it! The drive becomes un-mountable without an
>active boot partition.
It's not clear whether you mean unmountable from Windows, or
unmountable on the Mac - presumably the former. Either way this has
nothing to do with reformatting the drive. The "active boot
partition" on an fdisk-partitioned disk is really just a flag in the
partition table, somewhat similar to the Startup Disk setting in a
Mac's PRAM.
"Low-level format" means something specific and different, which just
isn't possible on IDE disks.
>Perhaps that's what I was told. I'm sure there was a way to render an IDE
>drive "invisible" to the Mac. Just don't remember the specifics.
I have my doubts - the only thing I can think of that would
correspond here is if Drive Setup (or perhaps the File Exchange code
that reads Windows fdisk partition tables and FAT filesystems) were
confused trying to display the current state of the disk, and just
skipped the device. I doubt whether it would do that, however, and if
it did you could definitely work around the problem by using a
different partitioning utility (HDT etc). This won't happen if you
zero the disk, though. Think about it - the state a factory-new disk
comes in is completely zeroed, so Drive Setup is actually expecting
to see them that way.
>Seems odd though that Laurent's new drive would pick that moment to kick the
>bucket. Of course since it is new perhaps there is a warranty he could fall
>back on. Even if he's not the original purchaser some manufacturers will
>repair or replace a drive based on it's manufacture date and warranty
>period. A company I worked for had a LaCie Tsunami drive that had crapped
>out after 3 years. It then spent a year in a drawer. I suggested it could be
>replaced but I could not find proof of purchase. But since it had a 5 year
>warranty it was replaced for free. Good folk at LaCie.
It's possible that Laurent's drive had bad blocks that had never been
touched until he tried to write to them (by zeroing the entire disk),
and flaky firmware in the drive freaked out trying to map them all
out. It's also possible that the drive was going to go anyway, and
the sustained use involved in writing to every single block was the
proverbial straw. If it were my drive, I'd try it with another disk
partitioning utility, then give up if that didn't work. The problem
with salvaging bad drives is that you can never particularly trust
them again.
>How does a drive make it's presence know to a computer? I've found that even
>a bad drive can still show up even if there's nothing you can do to save it.
Most bus designs (like ATA and SCSI) have some sort of signaling
procedure where the host controller says "anybody there?" and any
devices present say "yup, I'm a <blank>". This is roughly how SCSI
works as well, though it's a lot smarter about it. Whether a device
shows up depends on just what state it's in - there are a lot of
things that can go wrong from the drive controller down to the
physical machinery.
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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