Q4105@pucc.Princeton.EDU (W.g. Price q4105 Mathtech) (11/06/90)
I am supporting a plain PS/2 model 30 with a 20 meg hard drive that has developed many bad sectors. (I don't know if this was sudden or gradual but overlooked.) I would like to try a low-level format before buying a replacement, but can't figure out how. The setup disk that came with it does not seem to have the advanced diagnostics, even in response to ctrl-A. Spinrite says that the drive is RLL encoded with sector translation, so it won't reformat. Norton's Calibrate and Ontrack's Disk Manager documentation also say they won't work. Is a reformat accessable in the BIOS via Debug the way it is on the XT ? is there anything appropriate available on SIMTEL ? (Please e-mail any replies - my system flushes messages in less than a day.)