On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 19:07, Tony Duell wrote:
>
> Is there? I was under the impression there were guard bands on the very
> inside and very outside of the disk (used when the heads are loading,
> etc). Bot not between each pair of data tracks.
>
The manual I'm looking at says the guard tracks are on either side of
the data area. I read this to be the sector's data area, but I can see
where it could also be the disk's data area.
> >
> > When a drive is told to seek to a particular sector, it reads the
> > factory written sector header to determine if it is the correct sector.
> > If the drive can not find this info quickly enough, it will fault.
>
> Sorry, but no. The drive doesn't check the headers at all. I've been
> through the schematics and there's nothing that will look at digital
> data on the disk. It will fault if it can't find the servo signals, though.
>
According to the manual I have, CSR bits 10 and 12 will be set if the
drive does not locate the correct sector within 200ms. This would seem
to imply that the header IS read and checked. If not by the drive
itself, then by the controller. Perhaps I should speak of the
Drive/Controller system?
At any rate, I don't believe it is worth the effort to attempt to
reformat a bulk erased disk.
--
Christopher L McNabb
Operating Systems Analyst Email: cmcnabb_at_4mcnabb.net
Virginia Tech ICBM: 37.1356N 80.4272N
GMRS: WPSR255 ARS: N2UX Grid Sq: EM97SD
Received on Tue Dec 10 2002 - 19:35:00 GMT