John and Samy, The question of whether a low-level format is necessary or not is sort of moot for me, at the moment. I went back and did a separate low-level format and verify, no errors. I didn't really think there were. So then I inserted the 7.1 personal bootdisk in the floppy drive, it started up, went to Yast 2, after a couple of steps it told me that there was no hard drive (yes, the tekram card was in and the SCSI bios was installed), and dumped me to Yast1. I went through the autoprobe, put in the modules disk per instructions, it located the tekram SCSI card, and the Realtek NIC (but not the 3com 3C509). After that I selected installation, and there it hung. Just like it did before all of this low-level formatting, etc. Right now the 6.4/IDE system is up and running. I will go back and try to install 7.0 on the SCSI disk one more time, and then find some other use for the 7.1 package. This really looks like the end of the line for SuSE and me. Stan Koper ----- Original Message ----- From: John Karns To: cll muzh Cc: Samy Elashmawy ; SuSE Linux Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2001 1:00 PM Subject: Re: [SLE] 7.1 Won't Install, and Worse On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, cll muzh said:
Low-level formats should never be necessary, IMHO. A complete format+check does the same sort of thing.
I question whether that's true in all cases. I have a couple of damaged IDE drives from my portables that won't format. If I had a low level format utility I might be able get around the problem. I think surface damage issues are sometimes best handled this way. I also think it depends on the drive design. I'm not sure that all drives are designed to do auto sector re-allocation when they encounter read / write errors. And if it's available, I don't see why I shouldn't use it - it's not black magic. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- John Karns jkarns@csd.net -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq