Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!cg-atla!fredex
From: fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Clusters disappear/reappear - (UPDATE !!)
Message-ID: <7881@cg-atla.UUCP>
Date: 6 Nov 89 18:46:41 GMT
References: <89Nov5.213213est.18444@me.utoronto.ca> <89Nov6.022738est.18444@me.utoronto.ca>
Reply-To: fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith)
Organization: Agfa Compugraphic Division
Lines: 29

In article <89Nov6.022738est.18444@me.utoronto.ca> yap@me.utoronto.ca (Davin Yap) writes:
>I've reformatted my HD, and restored the files with the following
>results:
>
>                                                                   The
>obvious solution would be to reformat the disk with a better formatting
>program than the one provided with DOS - it took less than two minutes
>for format.com to format each of my two twenty meg partitions, this
>doesn't bode well for its thoroughness in my eyes.




   A H A  !!!!

You see, DOS' format.com DOES NOT FORMAT A HARD DISK! even though it does
format a floppy. On a hard disk it does a bit of noodling around and writes
a fat and root directory for a blank disk. Probably does some other things, too,
but it DOES NOT do a low-level format. Therefore, if you had "weak" spots on
the disk before, then you still do!

The Advanced diagnostics for the IBM PC/XT (and presumably the AT) have a function
to do a low-level format on a "fixed disk". Many controllers also have the ability
to do so, if you can find out how to access it on your particular controler. There
has been much discussion of this in this group and others this year.

So, you need to find one of these methods and do a LOW LEVEL format!

Fred