-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 September 14, 2003 12:32 am, Ronald J. Hall wrote: <whack>
> I'd have to 2nd this - I've always been told to reformat an IDE > drive, not low-level though, leave that to SCSI drives. I'm told it > can actually destroy and IDE drive and render it useless. My > understanding is, that under that *other* OS, when you pick format, > its actually saying "partition".... :-) Depends on the drive and the circumstances. A year ago a friend acquired a 13 GB Maxtor drive that was about a year old. It had been data storage for someone she knew, the data files were all encrypted and couldn't be wiped. Format wouldn't touch it, "Invalid partition table" and the drive was at that point worthless so what did she have to lose? Nobody knew the encryption key. I hooked it to my system with no drives connected but that one and used the low level format in the BIOS to recondition the drive. Took just over 4 hours, but it worked. Then I installed Mandrake 9.0 on it for her. She's still using it with 9.1. Maybe I just got lucky but it wasn't the first time, and probably won't be the last. To the original poster; if the drive has bad sectors on it and you can't do anything else with it I suppose a low level format may be worth a try but I sincerely doubt the efficacy. I'd say just "bite the bullet" and get a new drive. Steve Gibson's Spin Rite is an amazingly effective tool written in pure assembler but even magic of that sort has limits. Good luck! Charlie - -- Edmonton,AB,Canada User 244963 at http://counter.li.org Cooker on kernel 2.4.22-8mdk 01:23:06 up 9:16, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.13, 0.24 When you jump for joy, beware that no-one moves the ground from beneath your feet. -- Stanislaw Lem, "Unkempt Thoughts" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/ZBkfG11CaRuZZSIRAgZPAKCyVVcQkVhXuKHK0t6SrQwwVJ4C4QCfXCKR /Ok7cECsJ4bZFS//XzQTGjs= =EoO+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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