tazmun wrote:
> I can only speak for sure of fairly modern Maxtor drives, the smallest being
> 4.3 Gig. They do supply the utility from their website. It is included
> with their standard utility disk. However it is called "write test" there.
> I have run this test on several different drives with no ill effects that
> I'm aware of. It has successfully brought drives back that were previously
> unuseable. However I would not run it just as normal service, but rather if
> all other options failed. On mine the chief reason for this was trying to
> bring back a ext2 files system to fat 32 again the drive became unusable
> running dos fdisk. Possibly this is a different process then what was
> referred to as low level formatting in earlier puter days? I remember there
> was something called "RTFM" type hard drives.(Not sure about that
> abbreviation or name) and they did have some sort of low level formatting
> that was different from our current EIDE drives and of SCSI drives I have
> not a clue, but perhaps that should be addressed here too. Especially SCSI
> as those are more common in high end systems.
Tazmun,
Thanks for the response! Ahh, yes, IIRC, MFM was the second type of
hard disk available for the PC / hobbiest. (MFM had something to do
with Manchester encoding, IIRC.) IIRC, RLL was another type of early
hard disk (or was it just an encoding type).
Anyway, I think we're in the era I'm curious about -- maybe someone else
will recall which disks were not supposed to be low level formatted, and
whether there was a valid technical reason or not.
regards,
Randy Kramer
