Hello Kali, hello Glenn, On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 11:24:59 +0900, Kali Mclaughlin wrote:
> I am completely confused about formatting and fdisking. There is a "low > level format" thing as well that my Pentium wont do, but the good old > 386 will. Low-level formatting means putting track and sector address marks on the magnetic surface of the disk. This is needed only for floppies and old non-IDE (i.e., without integrated controller) hard disks that were used in XT machines; please do not confuse true HD controller cards with their own BIOS and dedicated cables with the ISA, VLB or PCI host adapters (unfortunately, often also called `controllers') with just a standard 40-pin IDE connector(s). Low-level formatting of an IDE hard disk is done by its manufacturer and normally shouldn't be performed by the user. It's very unlikely that it can do anything good and may be even harmful (IDE disks have their internal bad sector maps and other tables, which are not visible at DOS or BIOS level, and you can destroy them by low-level format; at least I have a book that says so). If you wish to physically wipe out all data on your hard disk (i.e., fill all sectors with zeros), use a tool like WIPEINFO from older versions of Norton Utilities or similar. DOS FORMAT only writes new empty root directory and new File Allocation Table with all clusters marked as empty (or bad, if needed); it is not low-level format (but on floppies, DOS FORMAT does low-level formatting, unless it is a `quick format' -- `FORMAT /Q'). DOS FDISK only writes new partition tables and initializes their boot records. > I am told that to clean up a HDD you run fdisk, and then format.com with > switches for HDD rather than floppy. It seems to be different with DRDOS > which I use normally. Its fdisk seems to do the formatting. On Fri, 27 Jun 2003 22:56:33 -0400, Glenn McCorkle wrote: > DrDos Fdisk does not 'format' the partition. > Rather, it simply 'verifies' the clusters which have just been > assigned to the newly created partition. Well, not exactly. DR-DOS FDISK does format the newly created partition, so you don't have to run FORMAT on it. (BTW, In the old versions of DR-DOS, FORMAT worked only with floppies!) But the partition formatted with FDISK isn't identical to one formatted with FORMAT. FORMAT uses newer style (DOS 4.0+) of so-called BIOS Parameter Block, so it may be a good idea to apply FORMAT anyway. >> Perhaps DRDOS fdisk is messing up my HDDs? > Not very likely. > I use no other Fdisk but OpenDos v7.01 There is a small problem with partitions created with DR-DOS 7.03 (or maybe 7.02+, I forgot): the so-called OEM label is set to "DRDOS 7", whereas some software requires it to be like "AAAAA#.#" (e.g., "IBM 3.3", "MSDOS5.0", etc.) This may cause the partition to be incorrectly recognized by some programs, and (in very special cases of partitions smaller than 128 Mbytes, if I remember) may even lead to data corruption when the partition is accessed from MS-DOS. More details on this can be found in OpenDOS and FreeDOS mailing lists archives (on topica.com and delorie.com, respectively). > And I have *never* had so-much-as a single bad cluster.... *ever* :)))) Well, this is in no way related to DOS version. Hope this helps, Michal
