17 Oct
2000
17 Oct
'00
8:50 a.m.
On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) wrote:
On Tue, 17 Oct 2000 THETechnoid(a)home.com wrote:
I think your chances of physically damaging an old HD as used on XT
class machines that way is rather slim. That said, the wrong figures
for CHT stuff will certainly render it unreadable.
You did, of course, do FDISK and FORMAT after the Low-Level, I presume.
- don
You can probably format the hard disk by loading
DEBUG from floppy and
entering the command:
"G=C800:5" - omit the quotes.
Can you damage a hard drive, if you put in the wrong numbers (# of
cylinders, interleave, etc) I had an old 8088 that hadn't seen action in
several years. I turned
it on, and it seemed to boot up and run ok, but the hard drive was full
of errors.
I thought, "Maybe a low level format will clean it up", as I had done one
a few years back on an old Leading Edge XT, and it seemed to help. So off
to Debug, and I did the G=C800:5 thing.
Of course, it asked for the number of cylinders, interleave, and a couple
of other things. Not knowing....I guessed!
After that I rebooted the computer---and---nothing! Not a peep out
of the hard drive, and the computer wouldn't start up. It would boot
off a floppy, but even then, the hard drive was unreadable...