Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2000 14:14:28 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: adam@whizkidtech.net (G. Adam Stanislav), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: M$ anti-trust case Message-ID: <4.3.1.2.20000425141125.00beb5e0@localhost> In-Reply-To: <200004251638.JAA02166@usr05.primenet.com> References: <4.2.2.20000418072728.04695100@localhost>
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Terry: Steve needs lower level access to the hardware than that. He needs to be able to inspect the surface literally at the bit level and do low-level reformatting. The hardware of modern IDE drives often does not allow this; you can't do a low-level format at all. Worse still, many drives insist upon hiding their caching so that you cannot be sure when a write is committed to the surface of the disc. Kirk complained about this last fall at FreeBSDCon, and he's right. --Brett At 10:38 AM 4/25/2000, Terry Lambert wrote: > > >Wouldn't surprise me. Nevertheless, their "deep scan" is not as deep as > > >Steve's. His deepest scan not only refreshes the data, it reformats the > > >underlying hardware while doing it. > > > > He can only do this on MFM, RLL, and ESDI. He can't do it on SCSI or > > IDE, because they don't allow him direct access to the hardware. > >FYI, you can directly access the hardware by obtaining a level 3 >volume lock, then a level 1 volume lock, and then using a VXD to >directly manipulate the raw driver interfaces. > >It's actually pretty trivial, even for Windows programming. > >C.v. "Partition Magic" for one example of a product that does this. > > > Terry Lambert > terry@lambert.org >--- >Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present >or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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