In some mail from Gary E. Miller, sie said: > On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Darren Reed wrote: > > > Too bad the pc Unixes don't have a format command like Sun has had > > for Solaris/SunOS....tells the hard drive to 'format' and then tests > > with a number of test patterns. > > You can not really force a low level format of an IDE or SCSI drive. The > drive that appears to the OS is not the real drive, but a virtual drive > managed by the disk electronics. > > The most you can do is ask the drive to format itself. Some do a good job > and some do not. The ones that return in seconds did not and the ones that > takes hours are doing better.
Have you ever actually used format on Solaris to format a SCSI disk ? It's somewhat similar, I believe, to "scsictl /dev/sd0a format" on NetBSD. I ask because your comments here make it seem like you have not...and the lack of that experience shows in the rest of your comments, too... Darren _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
