[X-Unix] Disk Formatting

[Alex]

On Tuesday, Feb 17, 2004, at 20:20 Canada/Eastern, Alex wrote:

> [...] Is there a CLI tool for this job?
                    ^^^
On Thursday, Feb 19, 2004, at 12:35 Canada/Eastern, William H. Magill 
wrote:

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


On Tuesday, Feb 17, 2004, at 20:20 Canada/Eastern, Alex wrote:

> I want to format a hard disk, scan the surface for bad blocks, and map 
> out the bad blocks, if any. [...]

On Thursday, Feb 19, 2004, at 12:35 Canada/Eastern, William H. Magill 
wrote:

> 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

In *BSD, methinks format would have been the most suitable for the job, 
but neither it, nor the ones you mentioned are included in Darwin.


On Thursday, Feb 19, 2004, at 12:35 Canada/Eastern, William H. Magill 
wrote:

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

I was under the impression that the basic reason was that current hard 
drives are low-level formatted at the factory, and handle bad/spare 
blocks themselves. Am I wrong?

At any rate, I find Darwin's lack of a utility to check the physical 
integrity of the disk puzzling.

f