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From: rowley@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Henry A. Rowley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Low Level Format of T1600 Hard Drive
Message-ID: <1990Jul10.184838.29540@cs.umn.edu>
Date: 10 Jul 90 18:48:38 GMT
Sender: rowley@cs.umn.edu (Henry A. Rowley)
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept.
Lines: 30

Does anyone know of a program that can do a low level format on 
a 20 MB Toshiba 1600 hard drive?  

I'd like such a program to try to fix up the hard drive in my T1600,
which is beginning to go wrong: It gives "Sector not found." errors,
and it is also very slow.  I wrote a program which measures seek
times, and found that seeks from a track to the next higher number
track take 5 millisec, less than the specified 8 ms.  Seeks in the 
opposite direction take between 100 and 500 ms.  

Has anyone experienced similar problems with their T1600?  If you want
a copy of the testing program, send me an e-mail message specifying
whether you want executables or sources (in Turbo Pascal and Turbo
Assembler), or both.  If there is sufficient interest, I will post
the program here.

One final question:  Is it possible to buy a replacement drive?  I am
hesitant to send it back to Toshiba to be replaced for $1000.  If I
buy a different size hard drive (say, 40 MB), will it work without
new ROMs?

Thanks in advance.

Henry A. Rowley          Internet: rowley@cs.umn.edu -or- rowley@ux.acs.umn.edu
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