Date   : Mon, 04 May 2009 17:02:49 +0100
From   : afra@... (Phill Harvey-Smith)
Subject: ADFS 1.53 patch

Mike Tomlinson wrote:
>> I've low-level formatted them loads of times using the Option ROM
>> formatter, which seems to succeed. The most recent one I got in a
>> PC1512 will run through the formatter, but running a disk checking
>> utility afterwards results in multiple read errors on each cylinder.
> 
> Are you selecting a suitable interleave?  (5 is usually recommended)

Interleave should not affect bad sectors, what it will have an affect on 
however is the speed that you can get the data off the drive. Indeed 
some floppy based systems use an interleave of 3:1 for the same reason 
(Dragon 32/64 and Tandy CoCo are two that I know of).

For XT class machines normally 3:1, 4:1 or 5:1 was about right, I seem 
to remember that spinrite and norton speed disk could probe the 
interleaves from 1:1 to 8:1 and determine which had the fastest transfer 
rate and then re-format the drive.

Of course for IDE/ATA/XTA drives this might all be academic anyways as 
(citainly on modern drives), what the on board controler presents as the 
geometry of the drive has absolutely no relation to the actual physical 
geometry.

Cheers.

Phill.

-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.