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From: ill@uni-paderborn.de (Markus Illenseer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: Conner IDE drives
Message-ID: <1990Aug29.183630.25402@uni-paderborn.de>
Date: 29 Aug 90 18:36:30 GMT
References: <1990Aug11.040610.2366@agate.berkeley.edu> <11724@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Organization: Uni-GH Paderborn, West Germany
Lines: 24

buchholz@ese3.ogi.edu (Don Buchholz) writes:
[some stuff about IDE deleted]
>A few weeks after my experiences with the Conner IDE, I had the occaision to
>call Gibson Research (the makers of Spinrite).  They told me that IDE's do need
>low-level formatting, but that the format is something quite different from the
>typical MFM format that we're used to.  Apparently IDEs use a scheme called
>"sector translation" to lay down the data.  Western Digital and Seagate IDE's
>can be low-level formatted using the software provided by the manufacturer.
>Conner's disks, on the other hand, have a "proprietary" (a 4-letter word) for-
>matting scheme that requires one to send the disk back to Conner for a new
>format.  
Yes, this is alright! IDE-Drives DO NOT NEED LOW LEVEL FORMAT ! DO NOT DO THIS !
At all they have a build in bad-track handler wich is using a special range
of the free space on the drive to locate and to store the pointer of a bad-track
, so only use special software to low-level-format them. If possible use
fdisk to delete a partition then use format (DOS 3.xx or >) Under UNIX or OS/2
you don't have to do something like this.
[stuff deleted]
>Don
CU, Markus
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   Markus Illenseer                I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid, I can't do that. 
     4790 Paderborn ,United Germany           Email: ill@uni-paderborn.de 
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