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From: ashing@milton.u.washington.edu (Al Shing)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Mitsubishi MR535 65MB RLL Problems
Message-ID: <5943@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 6 Aug 90 18:34:15 GMT
Sender: ashing@milton.u.washington.edu
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
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I used Disk Technician Pro to do a destructive low-level format on my 
Mitsubishi MR-535 hard disk this weekend, and to my surprise, FDISK came
up and said "Error reading fixed disk" and quit.  The setup defined the
disk as a type 17, and this defines it as having 986 cylinders, 5 heads,
and 26 sectors.  A LLF with DTP a couple of months ago worked fine, so I
don't think there are any compatibility problems.

Eventually, I tried a program that came with my system, called HDFORM.  
This program marked cylinders 977-986 as bad, which is fine, because I've
never had more than 977 cylinders anyway, but it also marked cylinders 0-8 
as bad, which was surprising, because I've never had any problems with 
that area before.  

After HDFORM, FDISK started working, but it now starts at cylinder 9,
instead of cylinder 0.  This resulted in a loss of some 600,000 bytes on
my hard disk.

Not wanting to accept the loss of that many bytes for no reason at all, 
can someone tell me if there is something wrong with my LLF procedure, and
if it is possible to recover cylinders 0-8 on my HD?  The machine is a
Leading Edge D3, 386-16 MHz system.

Al Shing (ashing@cac.washington.edu)