Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 18:22:22 -0800 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Riccardo Veraldi <riccardo@righi.ml.org>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: HOW to format ? Message-ID: <36CCCADE.E2A39877@3-cities.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9501011021560.649-100000@righi.ml.org> <36CC3F61.91EB4912@3-cities.com> <19990219082520.N14890@lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey wrote: > > On Thursday, 18 February 1999 at 8:27:13 -0800, Kent Stewart wrote: > > Years ago, Riccardo Veraldi wrote: > >> > >> Hello, > >> ther is any tool for FreeBSD to allow low level formatting of an hard > >> drive ???? or simple a formatting tool for hard drive ?? > >> thanks a lot. > > > > Low Level Formating is a function of the type of hard drive and the > > manufacturer. The manufacturer's have utilities to do LLF. There are tools > > to do LLF on SCSI but you should visit the manufacturer's web site for your > > IDE. Western Digital has a tool called WDDiag that does it from a DOS boot > > floppy. For WD disks you do a "write zeros" to the disk, which is their > > equivalent of a low level format. > > This is only partially correct. Nearly all SCSI disks obey the > `format' command, which you can issue via the scsiformat(8) or > camcontrol(8) commands. FreeBSD doesn't supply a tool for formatting > IDE disks, but every BIOS does. This means that you'll have to shut > down the system, which is a nuisance, but you don't need to install > Diagnostic Operational Support. > > Formatting involves a whole lot more than writing zeros to the disk. > It writes the sector headers as well, and the pattern that it writes > is designed to be relatively difficult to read, so that the > verification pass can catch flaky sectors. My bios'es (Award and Phoenix on 5 different computers) don't support IDE formating. I had a couple of ancient systems that did but nothing dated after 1996, which is my oldest bios. The "write zeros" is the menu option used to start a low level format in the WD utility program. In addition, WDDiag does a disk scan when it finishes, which can involve mapping replacement sectors into the sequence and giving you a full set. It is much more involved than anything provided via the bios. > > You almost never need to reformat a disk. This is a Microsoftism. > FreeBSD reports disk I/O errors, so you should know when a format is > needed. This part isn't always true from my experience. If I write a FreeBSD MBR to any of my Western Digital Caviar Drives with SMART, the system will not boot past the first HD test after finishing counting memory. In order to recover the drive, I had remove it from the bios and then boot from the floppy. I could then use WDDiag to low level format the drive using the appropriate I/O port (0x1f0 or 0x170) and offset. Next, you add the drive back into the bios and boot from the DOS floppy again. At this point you can "fdisk /mbr" and have a working drive that will not hang my system. From this point on I was able to use options from the sysinstall menu to convert the drive into a mountable FreeBSD disk. -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html Hunting Archibald Stewart, b 1802 in Ballymena, Antrim Co., NIR http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/genealogy/archibald_stewart.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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