> One of my FreeBSD development boxes had a hernia last week when it lost > power while writing to disk. The drive wrote out garbage to a track. > > I want to reformat the drive, (low level) but the bios doesn't have any > support to do this (In the past That is how I did this). > The machiine has 1 CD drive and no floppy.. > > anyone with any ideas as to how one can reformat a hard drive feel free to > lend me a clue..
Modern drives have low level formatting done at the "factory" due to drives having multiple zones (different sectors/track in each zone) and other horrible things done to sqeeze out many more bits of storage. They even retired the "FORMAT" opcode from ATA standard! I think your best bet may be to see if you can find a windows program that will "reinit" the disk. Your disk's vendor may provide such a utility, usually mislabelled "DiscWizard" or something for free. I am ready for Millipede :-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
