Peter Collier wrote:
On Tuesday 31 January 2006 00:30, Carl Hartung wrote:
On Monday 30 January 2006 16:20, Martin Soltau wrote: snip
SUSE kind of problem? Hi Martin,
I learned a very long time ago to:
- low level format - partition - high level (filesystem) format - activate - install
snip
I can't explain the precise mechanics of it, but my guess is there is still an assumption built somewhere into the underlying software that the installation is occurring on a new (empty) or properly "low level" formatted drive.
regards,
- Carl
I may be getting this wrong but I recall something from years gone back when a 40 meg hard drive has as big as you could get for a home pc. In those days, I think they said then, that you weren't suppose to low level reformat a drive once it had been done. I could be mistaken, years of memory eroding away, or is it a case that it's ok to do that nowadays. If so, how do you do a low level format? It used to be an option in the bios all those years ago but I've not seen it for nearly 20 years.
Drive technology has advanced since then. Back in those days, the main benefit of reformatting was to identify bad spots on the disk and mark them unavailable. Newer drives do this automagically and then map a spare sector to replace the bad one. This also means that when you start seeing bad sectors, it's time to replace the drive.