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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

I am sure my partner will be interested to read all this since he is more 
interested in theory than in practice, but we are not at all short of 
drives, in fact someone just gave us another 8G drive yesterday, and the 
time involved in doing what you suggest is not worth the time saved in 
avoiding an occasional pause for reset.  I am the one who put all the 
software onto the computer so he could play with it.  


He once attmpted to do a low level format of a 1G drive with EasyDrive on 
it (because PQMagic won't work with it) and destroyed it.  EasyDrive let 
older computers access drives larger than 540K.  Worked fine until you 
tried to repartition the drive.  Some other partitioning program was found 
that worked with Easydrive on the drive, I forget which one.

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003, Matrix Mole wrote:

> On Sun, 28 Dec 2003, Sindi Keesan wrote:
> 
> > I think ef2sck runs automatically if you turn off linux without exiting
> > properly, or it crashes.  Scandisk checks the actual physical disk for bad
> > sectors as well as checking file systems.  We probably did this before
> > formatting.
> 
> Scandisk (both the DOS and windows version) only check partitions, even
> the surface scan will only check the partition it was told to check.
> Obviously, if you did this prior to partitioning the linux system out of
> the 8gb then it should've found any possible bad sectors (and marked
> them). Also, most format programs (mke2fs on linux IIRC) have an option to
> check sectors and mark bad ones as bad. Or perhaps it's just that it tests
> the sectors that are already marked bad.
> 
> For truly finding the bad sectors there's one possibility that I could
> recommend, but only if you have no qualsm about rebuilding all the
> software again. Find out the manufacturer of the HD and go to their web
> site, then d/l the low level format utility from them. The low level
> format utility will usually make it's own boot disk. Make a seperate boot
> disk that is bootable (either use the disk version of BL, or make a
> DOS/win9x boot disk). If using the dos option put fdisk, format, and
> scandisk on the boot floppy. After the low level format, fdisk to create a
> partition (or however many you want), format all the partitions as dos
> partitions. Then run scandisk with surface scan on all the partitions. I
> don't know the linux disk tools well enough to explain how to do it with
> them. I'm sure it's pretty much the same just replace the file names with
> appropriate linux versions. I believe they are cfdisk, mke2fs, and ef2sck.
> Obviously, as I mentioned at the begining, you'll have to reinstall
> everything onto the machine once finished though.
> 
> A couple other options. First, the manufacturer _might_ have a diagnostic
> utility that can be used on the HD, but this is doubtable. Or, you could
> check to see if the drive is still covered under teh manufacturers
> warranty. If it's an 8gb, it might be new enough to still be covered. I'm
> not sure about the legalities. I do know that if the person who threw the
> system to the curb had given it to you, the warranty would still be
> considered in effect, so it might just work (although I'd still refrain
> from mentioning to the manufacturers person that it was found at the
> curb). You might be able to get a replacement HD at the very worst. Of
> course, a replacement would require reinstalling everything as well, but
> it be essentially a brand new HD :) Actually, at the very worst, you have
> to keep the current HD, but it's still useable.
> 
> Matrix Mole
> matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
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