Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!hellgate.utah.edu!caen!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!pilchuck!amc-gw!sumax!polari!davego From: davego@polari.UUCP (dave oliphant) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: HELP. Need diskette torture tester for finding bad disks. Summary: AmigaDOS format is as good as it gets! Message-ID: <3092@polari.UUCP> Date: 5 Jan 91 17:14:33 GMT References: Distribution: comp Organization: Seattle Online Public Unix (206) 328-4944 Lines: 42 In article jkh@bambam.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes: >Yes, like most folks, I'm occasionally tempted by lower cost disk >deals and have about 5 boxes of off-brand specials. For the most part, >I've had good luck, but have occasionally have been bitten rather >badly. The AmigaDOS format command seems to be virtually useless for >finding bad sectors (I'd be very interested to know what it means when >it says "verifying") and I've been racking my fish archive looking for >something that REALLY formats and verifies a disk. Sure, disks can go >bad at any time, but I'd like to at least weed out the initially bad ones >and/or be able to verify whether or not a disk has truly "gone bad" before >I give it the old heave-ho. >Can someone help this poor fool? Well, this old fool here seems to think that the AmigaDOS format command REALLY does format and verify just fine. As a person who seems to attract a good portion of the bad disks out there, I have found that if AmigaDOS format says a disk is bad, it is. What I think it means to verify is that the format command writes data from a buffer in memory to a track on the disk, then it reads the just-written data back into another buffer in memory and compares the two buffers. If they match, it was a good write. If not, some error occured. I also use a pd backup program called TurboBackup, version 1.00, (22 Apr 88), written by Steffen Stempel and Martin Kopp, that is the fastest disk copier (non-copyprotected) I have used. It takes about 105 seconds to copy with verify. There is no non-verify copy option. This program seems to me to be as good as AmigaDOS format in catching bad sectors. I have tried another program called BFormat (don't know the author) which porported to format disks with bad sectors. It did this by first determining which sectors were bad, and then marking the sector bitmap as used for all the tracks with bad sectors. However, I found that the bad disks I formatted with BFormat would not store files reliably, but all would fail eventually. w -- davego@polari.UUCP Dave G. Oliphant "Just where is dave going, anyway?" (206) 325-5669 2d ACR - Always Ready! (I'm with you guys) send the scouts out