It's been a long time since I worked on drives like this. There are two kinds of format. Normal high level format and low level format. Low level format can sometimes be done from BIOS, but sometimes it was done from a routine on floppy disk. I remeber that at least some Western Digital drives did the low level format from routine on floppy disk. Most commands from the disk controller assume a low level format. If the low level format is corrupted, it returns read errors. If the first sector on the disk is bad, nothing can be done. If you get read errors on sector 2, you can set sector 2 bad in the low level format and bypas it. If you cannot do a low level format, you have mechanical or electrical problems. There are utility programs that will read any sector on a hard drive directly, ignoring the directory and partition tables. I don't have one that works on SASI drives. wlevak@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2014-08-26 04:00:02
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