gwoho@nntp-server.caltech.edu (g liu) (02/04/91)
i have a scsi hard drive. presumable the drive is suposed to know where all the bad tracks are and aviod them, so it appears to have no bad tracks. it however has a bad track that is not in its list of bad blocks. if i send a command to read it, it never responds. (its a st277n) there is what looks like a battery on the drive. what happens if i remove it? i want to know how i can tell the drive to low level format itself, check for bad blocks and store them in the memory. if i just remove the batery, i supose the memory would go, and the drive would have to do a media analysys and remark the bad tracks. either that or quit working forever. (or maybe until i send it the right command) (i have the software to send arbitrary commands down the scsi) i have a future domain tmc880 controller. any help would be appreciated. gwoho liu.
hanke@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch (Norbert Hanke) (02/05/91)
If you can execute arbitrary SCSI commands, you might try to issue a FORMAT UNIT command. Command format: Byte 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 X'04' Byte 1 ----LUN---- FmtD CmpL DefectListForm. Byte 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 X'00' Byte 3 Interleaving factor (MSB) Byte 4 Interleaving factor (LSB) Byte 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 Flag Link The FmtD, CmpL and DefectListForm fields are rather difficult to use, my Fuji manuals has 10 pages dealing with these; I suggest leaving them at zero. This should work with most SCSI drives. Norbert Hanke ETH Zurich