[X-Unix] Disk Formatting

[William H. Magill]

On 19 Feb, 2004, at 09:37, Alex wrote:
> On Wednesday, Feb 18, 2004, at 19:31 Canada/Eastern, Barry Lyden wrote:
>
>> It has been my experience that many new after-market drives include 
>> such tools. [...]
>
> For instance?

Silverlining from LaCie. FWB's Hard Disk tool kit. Apple's HD Utility. 
... except that they all only run on OS 9.

In *BSD there are a couple of utilities for different types of media:

fdformat - format floppy disks
fdwrite - format and write floppy disks
sformat - SCSI disk formatting/partitioning/analysis/repair utility

The basic reason that Apple does not include a low-level format routine 
any more is the size of the disk drives.

A low-level format takes HOURS for large disk drives. And if you abort 
it part way through, until you run it again to completion, that drive 
is useless. Most users do not have the patients to do it, and cause 
more trouble than they resolve. [The last time I did one was on my old 
9600 and it ran for 18 hours on, what by today's standards, is a 
"small" drive.]

There is an outside chance that the new Drive 10 or TechTool Pro4 does 
the deed, but I don't know off hand.

Also, drives have a "known" bad-track list which is determined by the 
factory and must be applied when any new low-level format is 
accomplished.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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