[QUOTE=squeegee]
You guys had FDISK? Man, I had to write an unrolled loop to format my 1meg hard drive. 4 million lines of code it was. I had to save the code on 20k feet of paper tape, too. I got tired of that and just used the 1-bit switches on the front panel the next time.
[/QUOTE]
Paper?!?!? You had paper??!?! We had to scratch binary into stone tablets with our fingernails, then Paul was driving the cart full of tablets pushed to hard and crashed into a wall spilling several tablets to the ground and breaking them, thus effectively creating the first hard drive crash.
Especially disturbing was the damage to the tablet with the partition information.
[QUOTE=drachillix]
.. then Paul was driving the cart full of tablets pushed to hard and crashed into a wall spilling several tablets to the ground and breaking them, thus effectively creating the first hard drive crash.
[/QUOTE]
I imagine the crash caused the tablets to become terribly fragmented.
Just about 5 years ago, on my last ditch effort to use a Maxtor drive, the Maxtor folks sent me a dos-based text version low level formatter than took over 48 hours to run. So perhaps low-level formatting can still be done nowadays, although i dearly hope not. Since if you have to do a low level format, you’re better off buying a new drive anyway.
As an aside, i very clearly recall installing Windows XP on Western Digital raptor drives (RAID0, don’t yell at me) and did a full format in about 12 seconds. I thought i pressed the wrong button. So i rebooted from the CD again, did my controller drives, full format again in 12 seconds. Just out of curiousity, i rebooted a 3rd time to do the quick format and it went by in 3 or 4 seconds as expected. What makes raptors so much faster, other than 10K rpm? If it matters, why are servers able to format SCSI3 drives in the same amount of time?
[QUOTE=psychonaut]
A format is a format. Use whatever tool you’re comfortable with. I often format FAT-32 disks with Linux and I’m still alive.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, if you call that livin’.
