[lug] redhat install

[John Karns]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, J. Wayde Allen said:

> On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, j davis wrote:
>
> > its ide :(  was a brand new w.d.40 gig right out the box....I have installed
> > before without preformating my disk....
>
> I was referring to the low level formating of the drive
> <http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/L/low_level_format.html>.  For IDE disks
> this is done at the factory.  If somehow that got screwed up I think you
> have a definite problem.  Usually SCSI controllers have the ability to
> create a low level format.  I'm not aware of such capability in IDE
> controllers, but there may be a way.

AFAIK, the SCSI API or standard instruction set includes a low level
format instruction.  So the controller just says "do a low level format".
And most if not all SCSI hd's have the code on board to do it.  So that's
why almost all SCSI controllers include the feature.

OTOH, the IDE hd's don't support this, and one needs to have access to the
proprietary binary which is specific to the particular drive.  The mfr's
used to make such binaries available for DL, but this seems to have
changed; supposedly because ATAPI drives have the feature of auto
detecting low level r/w problems and compensate by updating the bad sector
map accordingly.  The idea I suppose is that problem sectors will arise on
a more or less random and occasional basis.

But for situations where the drive has suffered damage from a shock and
thus sustained damage to larger areas, a low level format can save a lot
of time.  One way of triggering this feature of the hd is to run a surface
scan such as the dos scandisk utility.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net