roger@banzai.UUCP (Roger Florkowski) (12/21/88)
For those unixpc guru's out there, here are some hard drive questions:
1) If you want to reformat your hard drive, how do find out which
hard drive format to use? ie, there are 5-6 different 40 meg choices
in the format menu?
I am aware that if you go into diagnostics s4test, you can type in
6,12 and it will give information about the drive. But that only
provides information about the current format job. This information
is incorrect if the drive was (mistakenly) formatted incorrectly.
2) If a drive has been formatted incorrectly, the bad block table
typically overflows during a surface test. How do you then empty the
bad block table? Reformatting the disk (again) does not empty it.
The Enter Bad Blocks option doesn't seem to allow me to delete
bad block entries. Actually, the results are questionable, since
my bad block table has 119 entries, and I have not been able to
get that budge up or down.
3) How bullet proof are the unixpc hard drive format/surface test
routines? Is it possible that what I am viewing as my own stupid
mistake might actually be a problem with my drive? This whole
adventure actually began when /bin and /dev got munged upon
in such a way where files/devices aquired very weird attributes
and permissions. Parallel Print outs (/dev/lp), were suddenly
showing up on another terminal instead of a printer. That's
when I shut it down. So, the hard drive might actually have
problems.......
Any answers to the above questions would really be appreciated.
--
Roger Florkowski uunet!uvm-gen!banzai!roger
The People's Computer Company `Revolutionary Programming'cdold@starfish.Convergent.COM (Clarence Dold) (12/23/88)
> For those unixpc guru's out there, here are some hard drive questions: ... > 2) If a drive has been formatted incorrectly, the bad block table > typically overflows during a surface test. How do you then empty the > bad block table? Reformatting the disk (again) does not empty it. ... > my bad block table has 119 entries, and I have not been able to ... In the .desc file, there is normally a line badblocktable 1 If this is changed to badblocktable 1 empty your bad blcok table will be emptied, and the values later in the .desc file (if any) will be the new contents. This will potentially trash data in those sectors that are really bad. If badblocktable 1, it will only hold 127(?) bad spot references. If you have more, iv should complain. I don't know why 119 is the number where you're stuck, but that is awfully close to the limit. -- Clarence A Dold - cdold@starfish.Convergent.COM (408) 434-2083 ...pyramid!ctnews!professo!dold MailStop 18-011 P.O.Box 6685, San Jose, CA 95150-6685