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From: Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) on 14 Feb 2010 05:36
When I right-clicked a hard disk in Window$ and hit Format, was it the
hard disk controller that took over to format a particular sector on the
disk? Or was it the OS?

I wanted to reduce the fault tolerance level of the formatting process
such that it would mark a sector as bad when there was one single
read/write failure.

Right now, the Format process would retry again and again for long time
when a bad sector was hit. I don't want the process to retry, and just
mark it as bad.

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From: Arno on 14 Feb 2010 07:12
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage "Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps)" <toylet.toylet(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> When I right-clicked a hard disk in Window$ and hit Format, was it the
> hard disk controller that took over to format a particular sector on the
> disk? Or was it the OS?

None of them. The "format" operation under Windows does not format
(create and write) sectors. In proper OSes, what it does
is called filesystem creation. With a long "format" it just adds
a verify read of the surface.

> I wanted to reduce the fault tolerance level of the formatting process
> such that it would mark a sector as bad when there was one single
> read/write failure.

> Right now, the Format process would retry again and again for long time
> when a bad sector was hit. I don't want the process to retry, and just
> mark it as bad.

The retry is likely the disk. The controller cannot do it. The
OS may also do retries, but I think it does not in this case.

Is this a WD disk? They are known to take so long on read errors
that they get dropped by RAID controllers for unresponsiveness.

One thing you can try is to overwrite the disk/partition before
a format. That would trigger the reallocation process for sectors
known to be bad. The other option I see is using a "RAID edition"
drive or one that does support time limited error recovery and set
that. However I have no idea how to do that.

You likely should als run a long SMART selftest and look
at the attributes if you have a larger number of sectors with
read errors (say, >10), quite possibly the drive is dying.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name
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----
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From: Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) on 14 Feb 2010 08:26
> One thing you can try is to overwrite the disk/partition before
> a format. That would trigger the reallocation process for sectors
> known to be bad. The other option I see is using a "RAID edition"
> drive or one that does support time limited error recovery and set
> that. However I have no idea how to do that.
>
> You likely should als run a long SMART selftest and look
> at the attributes if you have a larger number of sectors with
> read errors (say,>10), quite possibly the drive is dying.

I miss the old way of formatting hard disk (DOS days).... bad sectors
were detected and marked properly....

--
@~@ Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY.
/ v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you!
/( _ )\ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.32.8
^ ^ 21:25:02 up 2 days 5:10 0 users load average: 1.08 1.08 1.08
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From: Christian Franke on 14 Feb 2010 10:06
Arno wrote:
>
> One thing you can try is to overwrite the disk/partition before
> a format. That would trigger the reallocation process for sectors
> known to be bad. The other option I see is using a "RAID edition"
> drive or one that does support time limited error recovery and set
> that. However I have no idea how to do that.
>


Some recent disks support the SCT Error Recovery Control (ERC) command
specified in ATA-8 ACS. The command allows to read and set the time limits.

It is supported by HDAT2 and by recent builds of smartctl.

See: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/projects/erc/
(The patch is included in upstream smartctl since 5.40 r3065).

Christian
From: Rod Speed on 14 Feb 2010 13:19
Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) wrote:

>> One thing you can try is to overwrite the disk/partition before
>> a format. That would trigger the reallocation process for sectors
>> known to be bad. The other option I see is using a "RAID edition"
>> drive or one that does support time limited error recovery and set
>> that. However I have no idea how to do that.

>> You likely should als run a long SMART selftest and look
>> at the attributes if you have a larger number of sectors with
>> read errors (say,>10), quite possibly the drive is dying.

> I miss the old way of formatting hard disk (DOS days)....

You can still boot a dos floppy and do those today if you want to.

> bad sectors were detected and marked properly....

But the drives of that era did not spare bad sectors themselves so we dont need the format to do that now.


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