Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!eutrc3!euteal!blitter
From: blitter@ele.tue.nl (Paul Derks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MFM as an RLL drive?
Message-ID: <407@euteal.ele.tue.nl>
Date: 19 Dec 89 10:43:40 GMT
References: <906@crash.cts.com>
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lines: 21

In article <906@crash.cts.com> jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) writes:
>phil@diablo.amd.com (Phil Ngai) writes:
>>Please stop repeating these untruths. Formatting an MFM drive as RLL
>>will not physically hurt it. It may not work in RLL mode but then,
>>some disks sold as RLL don't work in RLL mode either. In fact, some
>>disks sold as MFM don't work in MFM either. (I'm referring to DOAs.)

>I've encountered enough drives that won't handle the reformat.  Again, the
>primary offenders were the ST225 and ST251.  I don't know exactly why (and
>never knew since Seagate refused to touch them) they died, but I suspect that
> [stuff deleted]

Mr. Ngai is absolutely right, I have formatted some drives on MFM,
then later on RLL an on MFM again and I have never had any problem.
I think the Seagate drives Mr. Archambeau refers to would have also
crashed on MFM. It is a well known fact that Seagates aren't the 
most relaible drives. I know a couple of friends had ST238 drives 
who crashed (and these ARE RLL certified!), including one of me.


Paul Derks