lane@cs.dal.ca (John Wright/Dr. Pat Lane) (09/30/90)
I have successfully used Spinrite II on Western Digital's WD9x044 series
drives which are IDE (controller on the drive), RLL and do sector
translation but in some way that is transparent to Spinrite (I don't
know about Norton's). Every other track (or so), while Spinrite is
showing that it is processing that track, you can here the drive
oscillating between adjacent tracks. I don't know what if any harm
or good this does to the drive, so I suppose it is not to be recommended.
I only did it in a case where I had nothing to loose and it did clean up
some bad sectors which had developed on the drive.
Spinrite will not work on Miniscribe's 8051s or Rodime's RO3000 series
drives because these drives, in addition to sector translation, have a
cache built into the controller and Spinrite *is* able to detect this.
I think Seagate's new IDE drives also do caching.
--
John Wright ////////////////// Phone: 902-424-3805 or 902-424-6527
Post: c/o Dr Pat Lane, Biology Dept, Dalhousie U, Halifax N.S., CANADA B3H-4H8
Internet: lane@cs.dal.ca Uucp: lane@dalcs.uucp or {uunet watmath}!dalcs!lane