Spinrite is most famous for low-level formatting, which is only allowed
on old MFM drives, most IDE drives have a sticker that says "Do not
low-level format this drive". When I used a Model D with a hardcard, I
loved this program. I ran it twice a day because I had nothing else to
do :)
As for bad sectors, what's up with that? Why is it that sometimes a bad
sector will be marked bad, then I can format a drive and have it use
those 'bad sectors' just fine?
>
> well, I personally have never opened up a hard drive, if nothing
else
>because I've never had an extra to pop open (i'm too frugal. hehe.)
>
> Regardless, I have found the program "Spinrite" to work great on
IDE
>drives; it goes through and can fix bad sectors, or mark them totally
>unusable. this really differs from standard formats/etc, because I've
been
>able to take drives w/ 30mb of bad sectors and get it to 0 bad sectors,
and
>still running fine w/ no problems after a year. i believe they are on
>version 5, i got version 4 for about 20 bucks. This is kind of
off-topic and
>doesn't cover a whole lot of you out there, but when you buy a box of
100
>drives that are all "bad", you can sometimes salvage quite a few of
them.
>
>
>-Eric
>
>
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Received on Wed Jul 15 1998 - 11:27:37 BST