Low level formats , are those still possible ? How is this done in bios. I thought you had to use your os to fdsik and partion. I remeber back it the dos days , som manufactureres gave out flopies to do low leval formats. I thoght the newer drived could not be low leval formated ? At 09:57 AM 3/15/2001 -0500, John Karns wrote:

You may have a surface damage problem on the HD. Try a low level format via the BIOS util with the Tekram (F2 or F6 when prompted during boot). This should mark unread/unwritable sectors as being bad (provided the number doesn't exceed a limit which is drive specific), thus allowing you to proceed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- John Karns jkarns@csd.net

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Stan Koper said:

...

Hello all,

Nice to see all the wonderful comments about SuSE 7.1, but unfortunately I haven't been able to share in the success. In fact, SuSE 7.0 was a dog, as far as I was concerned, generating frequent segmentation faults all over the place.

But I didn't pay much for 7.1 personal, $19.99 at Best Buy, minus my Shaw's grocery card 10% discount. But it did inspire me to reinstall 7.0, which seemed to go better this time. Unfortunately, I thought I should upgrade the kernel to 2.2.18, and so I did that, with the result that the system is now freezing, with a disk error/Kernel OOPS message as described below.

This is an Abit IT5H motherboard, probably version 1.2 or 1.5, with a Cyrix 200 chip. It has 96 megs of memory, a CS4936 sound card, and an EIDE CD-ROM, 24x. I forget what kind of video card, but PCI SVGA. This is the gateway machine to my home network, so it has a 3COM 3C509 ISA card as eth0, hooked up to a cable modem, and a Realek 1839 10/100 PCI card as eth1 for the internal connection..

When I first set this machine up as the gateway, it had an IDE hard drive, probably 3 gigs, under a 5.x version of SuSE. Then I upgraded to 6.4, and installed everything on a new 8 gig IDE drive. At that time eth1 was a cheapo NE2000 card. Everything worked fine.

About the time that SuSE 7.0 came out, I was able to purchase a Seagate 9 gig SCSI drive for about $25, and got a Tekram DC-390 for around $30. So what I did was unplug the ide drives, plug in the cable from the SCSI drive to the controller card, go into the bios setup and erase the IDE drive entries (well, run the ID hard drives program), and reboot so that only the SCSI hard drive was up and running.

I installed 7.0 on that drive. Installing was problematic. This was 7.0 professsional, and at one point I even returned the set to the store, because it wasn't reading files on one of the CD's. But the replacement did the same thing. Anyway, I eventually got it installed and working, although with fairly frequent segmentation fault messages, mostly having to do with apache, and probably a few other things. But since I blew that away and reinstalled 7.0, those problems are gone..

But 7.1 doesn't install at all. First, it doesn't recognize the hard drive right off the bat. That drops it out of Yast2 to Yast1. So I install the SCSI module for the tekram card. Then I add the network modules, but only the Realtek card is found, not the 3c509 (not really a problem, 7.0 didn't recognize the 3com card either, it just has to be done later). At that point I'm ready to roll, and I select installation/update. The CD spins, and then stops, and there it sits. Nothing. Nada. Dead.

So I figured stuck with 7.0, I might as well upgrade the kernel. I used the *rpm for k_i386, not k_dflt. And now this. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Stan Koper

SCSI disk error: host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0 return code = 2504000 scsidisk I/O error: dev 08:05 sector 65704 reiserfs_bread: unable to read dev = 2053 block = 8203 size = 4096

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