Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > > On Monday, 8 July 2002 at 14:46:29 -0700, Kent Stewart wrote:
> > All of the manufacturers have a program that will do that. Many of > > them even produce a bootable floppy. Check their support web page. > > I went looking for format utilities and didn't find anything. Finally > I stuck the disk in an old 486 with a format utility in the BIOS, and > that worked (fortunately the damage was below the 504 MB boundary :-). > > While looking at these format programs, I gained the distinct > impression that they didn't really format. The description was too > vague to make it clear just what they did do, though. Quite possibly > it's the same as dd if=/dev/zero, and it just relocates the logical > sectors. Once in 1996 I had a Western Digital IDE disk that developed bad sectors on it. Rewriting it (doing dd) did not help. The BIOS format did not help. But when I returned this disk to the dealer they ran some low-level format after which the errors were gone and the disk worked happily ever after. So apparently they are not the same. -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
