I bought a 5500/225 thru the swaplist that came with a 12.66 Western
Digital ATA drive.
OS 9.04 was installed on it. I wanted to install 9.1. Due to my lack of
experience with the 54 & 5500 computers and WD drives I decided that I
would like to do a low level format and zero all data. The 1st time I
attempted this one of the options was ghosted out. I also seem to
remember reading that in the initialization window, it said that this
computer was either unfamiliar with this drive or that there was
security software on the disk. It also stated that initialization was
still possible. I continued with the other option (zeroing all data I
believe) and approx. 1/3 of the way it stopped righting the zeros.
Didn't freeze the computer, but for 2 hours the progress bar didn't
move at all. I forced quit the drive set up program and then the hard
drive vanished from sight. Drive set up and Norton Disk Doctor couldn't
find the drive and it refused to mount upon start up..
I left NDD in the CD Rom and shut down. A day or so later I came back
and when I booted the computer (figuratively) amazingly the drive
appeared on the desktop. I ran Disk Dr. and at about the same 1/3 of
the way in (checking media-the top one) according to the progress bar
stopped. Then Norton reported that the volume was damaged.
Fast forward a day and a half & I crack an anti static package
containing a 2 gig Western Digital ATA drive. This drive was suppose to
be an unused drive (convinced it was) I proceeded to replace the 12.66
HDD with this 2 gigger. When I power on (and do a fast swap of NDD with
OS 8.5.1CD, the 1st thing that I can interact with is , "This drive is
unreadable..." and I formatted it HFS+. I noticed that it said the same
thing when I opened Drive Set Up that it did when I 1st opened up DSU
with the 12.66 Gig, "the computer doesn't recognize this device, or it
may contain security software... bla bla bla.
I decided to initialize it, again, although it would only allow me to
format it HFS Standard. So it overrode initial HFS+ formatting...
apparently. I installed 8.5.1-8.6 and all has been OK (so far) with the
2Gb.
I transplanted the 12.66 Gig into a 5400/200 that had a dead drive, yep
a Western Digital 1.6 Gig.
I was amazed that with the OS 9.1 CD to boot from the 12.66 Gb drive
appeared, unreadable, but appeared. Formatted it with HFS+ and repeated
the DSU formatting. Again it wouldn't let me format other than HFS
Standard, it concluded doing so faster than it took for the 2 Gb and
last check revealed both partitions retained HFS+ formatting. Hmmm.
I came across an old copy of Tech Tool Pro v2.1 and installed it on
both halves of this 12.66 Gb HDD. First run diagnosing the bottom half
of the drive went through without a hitch, using the top half to boot
from OS 9.1 w/TTP 2. The inverse ended in a frozen screen probably due
in part to having booted with extensions on and using 8.6 & my After
Dark screensaver. I restarted with w/extensions off.
I just finished running TTP on the 1st partition and it successfully
completed a full run. It did however have "advice". There were bad
blocks detected and TTP said it did its best to "map out" these bad
sections from the file system except..... so I now know why a problem
occurred {bad blocks}.
I suppose my question is to all those experienced with ATA drives &
54-5500 machines out there, what software do you use to perform a low
level format and successfully zero all data on these drives? And since
you've read this far I might as well also ask which diagnostic and
repair utility works best with the same machines mentioned above, and
with ATA drives??
Thanks for reading and your learned responses.
KOG
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