izumi@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) (11/22/90)
In article <57237@brunix.UUCP> rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) writes: >First some technical points: >Low-level formatting takes about 30 min. Thus NeXT does not do that >with OS 2.0. What NeXT does is simply build a new file system on the >drive as it is. This does not optimize the drive at all. We never I was browsing through a Release 2.0 (a beta version) disk, and found "/usr/etc/sdform" and a man page for it. This program does appear to do low-level format of SCSI disks. Man page says that it is used both for hard disks, and SCSI floppies. As Ronald says, however, this is probably never invoked automatically by Workspace or BuildDisk. If your purpose of low-level format is to fix SCSI Media Errors, or just to make sure of fresh low-level format, this program appears to suffice. It's a command line program with basically no options, so it won't change sector size or cache enabling as Ronald'd "TheFormater" does. I assume it simply low-level formats with the current parameters as reported by "scsimodes". Izumi Ohzawa, izumi@violet.berkeley.edu