15 Jul
1998
15 Jul
'98
4:27 a.m.
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
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com