On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Ken Thompson wrote: >On Monday 04 February 2002 07:36 am, you wrote: >> Hi, >> >> It's generally not a good idea to use the low level formatting feature of >> some system board bioses. You might lose the factory skew settings put on >> your disk at the factory when they did the factory low level format. The >> system board bioses I have seen do not call the proprietary factory format >> routines on the hard disk; at least not the ones that I have seen. And >> I've seen a few. >> >> Sesame Galeo recommended a debug routine. If that works, it's the best >> way, because that command sequence is routing you to the hard drive's >> formatting routine in it's firmware. > > I don't think debug will work with the IDE or ATAPI drives, will it? >As far as I remember, the format stuff for debug was designed for MFM and RLL >drives usually found in 286 or older systems.. >I could be way off base here as I haven't used that command for nearly 8 >years <G>.... >The absolute best way is to use the utility from the mfgr because it is >designed to work with the proper size and series of drive you have. >
well...as it turns out after performing a LL format on this drive, a Maxtor 13.5 Gig, the best I could get out of it was 2GB's. I found the utility on Maxtor's website, which in itself I thought was amazing considering their site is ridiculous to navigate. It didn't seem to help at all since after the LL format the drive was still convinced that it was a 2GB drive. On the off chance it was the BIOS on the machine that I was working on the drive with I brought the drive to work with me and checked it out. No joy. That drive is shot and a new one is already on the way. but, thanks for all the reponses. daRcmaTTeR
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
