[comp.sys.atari.st] ***** HELP ******

XUUM24@PRIME-A.CENTRAL-SERVICES.UMIST.AC.UK (Mr. Stephen Culshaw) (03/23/90)

HELP !!!!!

My hard disk has decided to pack up. When I booted it up, it would go
through the normal sequence until it came to clear to the desktop.
Instead a lot of rubbish appeared on the screen, along with bombs,
and the machine reset to start going through the boot sequence again.
I had luckily backed up very recently so I thought I'd reformat
the drive.
When I did this the hard disk utility reported a 'FORMAT ERROR', so
now the disk does work. I phoned a couple of repair companies and
none were very helpful - mostly said 'Its f***ed - buy a new one'.
One of them said something about it needed 'Low level reformatting'
and that would have to be carried out on an Amiga, taking a lot
of time and costing a lot of money - why not buy a new one.
Can anyone out there sent me a program which can do this 'low
level reformat' without having to pay lots of money - difficult
as I don't have it.
This has really screwed me up - you don't realise how dependent
upon the hard disk you become until it isn't there.

Thanks in advance
Steve C.

A poor student desperately in need of help
PS. I should have said - the drive is a Triangle 20MB AT/HD20
and the software I tried was the Triangle hard disk utilities.