Date   : Mon, 04 May 2009 17:11:14 +0100
From   : zeem.uk@... (Alex Taylor)
Subject: ADFS 1.53 patch

2009/5/4 Jason Flynn G7OCD <flynnjs@...>:

> IIRC you should be able to flag bad sectors in the BIOS formatter.
> The duff sectors out of the factory were usually written on the
> top of the drive, but you can add to those.

It does give me the option, but the DOS-based disk checker is giving
at least one, more often two or three errors per cylinder. I left it
running for a couple of days once, it barely got halfway through the
drive. I think I tried adding various cylinder, head and sector values
to the bad block list in the low-level formatter, but I didn't get
anywhere and haven't tried since.

It did occur to me that while the low-level formatters in MFM
controllers usually *do* low-level format the drive (I resurrected one
like this, but the spindle kept sticking and the bad sectors started
to increase), IDE drives often don't do anything but go through the
motions, because all the low-level formatting is done at the factory
and cannot easily be changed. I remember stories in Amiga magazines
about people destroying IDE drives with a LLF, in cases where the
drive did format itself.

2009/5/4 Mike Tomlinson <mike@...>:

> Are you selecting a suitable interleave? ?(5 is usually recommended)

I think I selected 3, although I thought that would only affect transfer speed.

> Well, they're the best part of 25 years old, and were hardly the most
> reliable things even when new... ?what make and model are the drives,
> out of interest?

Both Western Digital, whose name is also on the hard card label. One
is from about 1989, the other about 1991. Both are very similar.

I have a suspicion that I can just stick in a CF card of less than
512MB, after reading some stuff on a web forum. I might as well try,
given how much a 256MB card and adapter will cost. If it doesn't work,
I can always stick them in an Amiga 1200 or something.

-- 
Alex Taylor