mikej@lilink.UUCP (Michael R. Johnston) (07/14/89)
I've been looking around lately for a general purpose hard drive low level formatting program. Since this is not the type of thing you find at your local "Egghead" shop I'm forced to bug you folks with this query. The software would ideally support many different types of drives and manufacturers and offer extensive error checking of the drive. I'm certain they are available as I recall seeing one menu driven program on a tech's workbench one day as I was picking up my computer. Can anyone offer suggestions to this? Commercial or sharware/pd packages are fine. Thanks. --- Michael R. Johnston System Administrator rutgers!lilink!mikej LILINK Public Access Xenix (516) 872-2137/2138/2349 1200/2400 Login: new
lance@helios (Lance Bresee) (07/14/89)
We have a program called SPINWRITE -Spinrite?- which does this and much more, I was going to include the manufacturer name, but the manual is gone! I've seen it advertised though. There is another hard disk program called speedstore, also missing manual, which does the same things, I think. Does anyone out there know more about these programs?
chao@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Chia-Chi Chao) (07/16/89)
In article <8376@saturn.ucsc.edu> lance@helios.ucsc.edu (Lance Bresee) writes: >We have a program called SPINWRITE -Spinrite?- which does this >and much more, I was going to include the manufacturer name, >but the manual is gone! >I've seen it advertised though. >There is another hard disk program called speedstore, >also missing manual, which does the same things, I think. >Does anyone out there know more about these programs? SpinRite from Gibson Research is a low level RE-formatter. The program requires the hard disk to be properly low level formatted first. The price is about $50, and I highly recommend it. It checks the hard disk, renews low level format information, and optimizes interleave factor. I bought mine from Dustin Discount Software in CA. 1-800-274-6611.
bill@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (William Tsai) (07/20/89)
In article <15482@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> chao@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Chia-Chi Chao) writes: >In article <8376@saturn.ucsc.edu> lance@helios.ucsc.edu (Lance Bresee) writes: >>We have a program called SPINWRITE -Spinrite?- which does this >>and much more, I was going to include the manufacturer name, > >SpinRite from Gibson Research is a low level RE-formatter. The program >requires the hard disk to be properly low level formatted first. The price is >about $50, and I highly recommend it. It checks the hard disk, renews low >level format information, and optimizes interleave factor. I bought mine from >Dustin Discount Software in CA. 1-800-274-6611. I highly recommend this program also. HOWEVER, there is some catch. The version I have (the first one) will not work with DOS 4.0. Second, at work we have several Dell 310 machines with somekind of hardware disk cache, and because Spinrite is not compatable with ANY TSR programs nor any disk cache schem, we can not get it to work. But on ordinary machines it works great. The author, Steve Gibson, also writes a column Tech Talk in InfoWorld. -- Bill Tsai University of Delaware CIS ARPA: bill@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (302) 738-1716 " The computer doesn't hate everybody - just you... "