failing hard drives after sitting for years...

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

You mean the mobo that's maxxed .. K6-233 , theoritically , support 4GB of memory . A board like A-open pro II can take 500 MB sdram for an example ..
So what's your mobo ?..
Consequently , you may have a probability to use USB to Ram technology .

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

and your acer also likewise can "theoretically" support 4GB but limited by chipset/board to 2GB, and how does RAM relate to hard drive testing?

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

You mean my Acer Travelmate support 2 GB Maximum memory .. And Intel Celeron M 370 can theoritically support 4 GB of rams ..
So what's your mobo ?

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

It's a motherboard that can test IDE hard drives and doesn't need 2GB RAM to do it. What does the motherboard matter?

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

Isn't it better than 256 Mb ? ... Even Vista or W7 32 Bit need a minimum of 500 MB . Easus Mater Pro needs 500 MB to Launch , etc.. 265MB is a poor choice , especially when you can go up ..

So what's your mobo ?

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

Are you saying you're going to upgrade the RAM in my motherboard to 2GB for free?

The machine does not need more RAM. There's a lot you can do in 256MB if you don't need a GUI.

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

How Am I gonna upgrade a mobo to a 2 GB physical memory , or probably lot more , using USB to Rams technology , if I don't know what it is ? ...

So what's your mobo ?

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

I need a commitment before you get to know. Sorry.

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

I can't promise fish while still in the sea ... When I know what's the mobo , i'll see what I can do about it .

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

You've already did too much damage and need to pay up.

[sam_sam_sam]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

What does the motherboard matter?

This does matter because I have some newer motherboard that have ide controllers will not support low level format-ing hard drives dos disks

And unfortunately I do not have an older motherboard that still works good enough to do this anymore

I wish I knew what type of motherboard that are still available that have a ide controller that supports a dos format so I reformatted some older hard drives and see if they are still useable or not

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

What IDE disk are you trying to low level format, most IDE disks are VC disks and cannot be low level formatted, as been said over and over again.

The major problem with IDE controllers is driver support. You'll be safe with any Intel controller as they sort of ended up became the standard. So most hard drive utilities end up using the Intel (actually IBM, to emulate the original IBM MFM controller) controllers. Any IDE controller that requires a driver automatically becomes disqualified.

BTW

Why do people want to know what board I have? I am not using DOS. I'm using Linux on this board if people haven't figured it out!

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

You've already did too much damage and need to pay up.

To what mobo ? ...

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

No, you did too much damage to this thread. So much offtopic drivel about needing to know a specific motherboard when there is no need.

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

No, you did too much damage to this thread. So much offtopic drivel about needing to know a specific motherboard when there is no need.

The thread was already miserable with the lot of wrong infos you put ...

[jiroy]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

Many programs do LLF without even mentioning it , probably due to copy rights , I don' know .. Here's HDD Regenerator at work . He doesn't specify the word LLF , BUT , he will do it ...

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

Actually it's sad people believe the incorrect information put in their software
You cannot LLF VC disks, period, again due to chicken and egg problem.
Remapping sectors is not now level format. This is an internal cooked function of the disk
There are "low level" proprietary function to each disk that are trade secrets and different to each disk requiring different software, sure, but this is not accessing the media at a low level. It just requires access to the hardware interface at a low level, which can be done with any hardware - if you have the drivers, if the software even supports drivers as it would need it's own as they bypass the OS.

So, it's you that is mistaken here.

[sam_sam_sam]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

EccerrOr

You are right about each hard drive manufacturers had there own formatting operating disk and had to have the right manufacturer disk for there own drive

But when they went SATA drives you stop see these types of disk available for hard drives and now you have SSD drives as well if your computer gets corrupted by what ever means what options do you have anymore

Back in the day you could just use a low level formatting disk when your computer got corrupted by what ever means you formatted the hard drive and reinstall the operating system and you were back in business

I have a hard drive that I need to reformat but can not do it even though it has a a ide port on the motherboard the formatting disk does not recognize the hard drive for what ever reason

Because I have the original install disk for this business computer and in order to use this disk it cannot be formatted because if it is formatted and has a operating system already installed it only tries to repair it not a new install which is somewhat crape that it is that way

I really do not want to have to buy another new hard drive if I do not have to

[eccerr0r]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

The proprietary commands still exist for sata but they are exactly that, proprietary. Then they have the special software tools that require a specific hardware to run on because they don't support drivers ... but what hardware it will run depends on that software tool.

Usually these software tools will detect the manufacturer of the target disk and give up if the disk is not for the same manufacturer. They integrate quite tightly into the firmware on the hard drive as well. Also note that sometimes VC hard drives' firmware, if they notice a serious error, will stop responding to the interface in order to not give a false sense of hope the disk can be recoverable (SSDs have been known to be worse in this respect). Another out of band interface on the hard drive interface board, like serial ports, can go a bit further and try to recover a sick disk, it possibly can override some of the mapping and perhaps restore some functionality of the disk with parameters changed.

In any case these programs still cannot low level format these newer VC disks like you could in the old days - other than some predefined manufacturer specific operations, you can only regenerate the higher level, filesystem format. If they truly were low level, it shouldn't matter what brand of disk but it does... In fact in the old days, this was true, you didn't even need to know the brand of disk, just the C/H/S of the disk, and where WP was needed if necessary.

Chances are if you're worried about needing to buy a new hard drive nowadays: yes you need to buy another hard drive. Most VC disks, best you can do is overwrite the whole disk linearly and hope that the on-disk system can regenerate whatever broken housekeeping recordings are on the disk. But if the disk won't detect, hopefully the model and serial number printed on the drive are usable to request a RMA.

[RetroComputingGrotto]

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...

I have a collection of over 350 retro/vintage laptops a lot of which are 20-30 years old (I got a job lot from a bloke at a car boot sale for around £75 per 100 old laptops) - 75% came with hard disk drives and the vast majority still work!

I did have one the other day that was dead, not spinning at all - when I held it up to my ear I could hear nothing. It was destined for the WEEE (eWaste for you non Europeans) so I had nothing to lose by dropping it from a short height and low and behold when I reconnected it, it started spinning!

Sometimes if a hard disk has been sitting for several decades the read/write heads can get stuck so some 'gentle persuasion' is required...