Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!decwrl!amdcad!diablo.amd.com!phil
From: phil@diablo.amd.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: low level format
Message-ID: <28312@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 8 Dec 89 05:22:53 GMT
Sender: news@amdcad.AMD.COM
Reply-To: phil@diablo.amd.com ()
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 20


I'm looking for some suggestions on low level formatters and bad block
handling. My WD1006 does have a formatter in its controller BIOS but
some of my other machines don't have this feature. Also I'm not very
impressed with the WD's formatter. On some disks it gets an error
after doing a verify or defect scan for a while (reading an IO
register?) and quits. (so I don't use those disks but I wish I could.)

Spinrite II is neat but it only does REformatting. It also sometimes
gets stuck handling a bad block and never goes on or stops for ESC.  I
got Disk Technician Advanced only to find it can't deal with
partitions > 32 megabytes.  (what bozos!) I had trouble with dm also.
I wasn't sure that the bad blocks it found were being seen by DOS.
(I'm pretty sure Spinrite II didn't cooperate with it anyway.) Any
other ideas? 

Just how do/should bad blocks be handled? 
--
Phil Ngai, phil@diablo.amd.com		{uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil
AT&T Unix System V.4: Berkeley Unix for 386 PCs!