Then I thought "better start from the ground, up" and decided to do a low level format. Under "fast partition erase" I saw the 4 partitions and thought, well there's an entry that says 'all disk, including RDB' ", then thought, "Why would I low level format only one partition. The other option in that box was "<all disk, including RDB>". I thought, "that's rather ambiguous, is it all the hard drives, or the one 'whole disk'?" Now, thinking about it, at the top only the 320 Gig HD is mentioned.
Instead, I went for the "7-pass full disk blanking" option.
Well, after I picked it, it says "Secure disk blanking..." in the grey rectangle below it, and the hard drive light is flickering.
There's a grey box below that which has the word "Ready" in it. Have no clue what that means.
There's no 'cancel' for obvious reasons, but, there's no progress bar either. That's okay, as this is trying to eliminate everything BUT, maybe, after pass 3, it should have a progress bar appear, and the option NOT to continue after the next pass?
Anyway, things degrade from here.
I could lose upto $400 over this (I wasn't expecting this to last this long).
The low level formatting startred Mar. 22, ~4:30p.m.-5:00 P.m. It's now Mar. 31, 9:40 p.m. That's 9 days and 4 hours 40 minutes.
Now, I anticipated it to be finished at ~Mar. 30, 1:35 p.m. At that point it was about 188 hrs and 30 minutes of formatting.
There are 625,142,448 cylinders * 512 bytes = 320,072,933,376 bytes 320,072,933,376 bytes * 7 passes = 2,240,510,533,632 bytes
I'm in PIO0 (that's zero. I don't know how to change it. I know it's done in UBoot, but that's harder to use than shell, and you should see how often I have to retype lines in shell trying to get it to do what I want, because I just can't get to grips with passing parameters to it properly. It's not easy to use at all.)
PIO0 is 3.3 Megs a second max, that's how I got the ~188 hrs and 35 minutes that it should have taken to finish. I used the highest speed it could do to divide by, as my AmigaOne is not doing anything else.
Well, it's still not finished as the hard drive light is still flickering. I know I shouldn't turn it off while it's read/writing. Any ideas as to what to do next?
Hopefully, it's just not done yet??
Edited by orgin on 2007/4/3 9:10:37
Support Amiga Fantasy cases!!! How to program: 1. Start with lots and lots of 0's. 10. Add 1's, liberally. "Details for OS 5 will be made public in the fourth quarter of 2007, ..." - Bill McEwen Whoah!!! He spoke, a bit late.
Atheist wrote: [..] Instead, I went for the "7-pass full disk blanking" option.
Well, after I picked it, it says "Secure disk blanking..." in the grey rectangle below it, and the hard drive light is flickering.
There's a grey box below that which has the word "Ready" in it. Have no clue what that means.
There's no 'cancel' for obvious reasons, but, there's no progress bar either. That's okay, as this is trying to eliminate everything BUT, maybe, after pass 3, it should have a progress bar appear, and the option NOT to continue after the next pass?
There really ought to be a progress bar and an option to cancel the operation because, well, it will take a long time to complete. Seven write passes are made for each block, and since each write access has to change the data on the disk no write cache is going to speed up the process.
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I could lose upto $400 over this (I wasn't expecting this to last this long).
This is primarily going to cost you time. I don't know how exactly into how much money this translates, though...
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The low level formatting startred Mar. 22, ~4:30p.m.-5:00 P.m. It's now Mar. 31, 9:40 p.m. That's 9 days and 4 hours 40 minutes.
Well, that's a bit long :-/
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Now, I anticipated it to be finished at ~Mar. 30, 1:35 p.m. At that point it was about 188 hrs and 30 minutes of formatting.
There are 625,142,448 cylinders * 512 bytes = 320,072,933,376 bytes 320,072,933,376 bytes * 7 passes = 2,240,510,533,632 bytes
I'm in PIO0 (that's zero. I don't know how to change it. I know it's done in UBoot, but that's harder to use than shell, and you should see how often I have to retype lines in shell trying to get it to do what I want, because I just can't get to grips with passing parameters to it properly. It's not easy to use at all.)
PIO0 is 3.3 Megs a second max, that's how I got the ~188 hrs and 35 minutes that it should have taken to finish. I used the highest speed it could do to divide by, as my AmigaOne is not doing anything else.
So you have the slowest disk access method possible, on a really large disk, for which each block is rewritten seven times over, and each write operation results in a disk access which does not go through the write cache. Ouch. There really should be a "Cancel" button and a progress display in the partitioning tool.
Quote:
Well, it's still not finished as the hard drive light is still flickering. I know I shouldn't turn it off while it's read/writing. Any ideas as to what to do next?
Hopefully, it's just not done yet??
Since you were trying to low-level format the drive anyway, what's the harm of rebooting the machine? It's not as you'd lose any data.
Incidentally, the "blanking" option was intended to make the data on the drive unrecoverable before you sell it or throw it away. It's not particularly useful in any other situation.
OS4Final is out since three months. It comes with Prefs/UBoot, there you can configure your UBoot settings with the mouse.
Afair, the prereleases >=3 come with uboot prefs too (although it had issues in pre3).
And there's well-documented idetool.
Anyway, I would reboot the machine, setup the apropriate speed and try to repartition the drive, formatting the partitions using non-quick format. Make it DMA and if it's an unfixed A1 make sure that networking is disabled (imho it's safe)
Jack
"the expression, 'atonal music,' is most unfortunate--it is on a par with calling flying 'the art of not falling,' or swimming 'the art of not drowning.'. A. Schoenberg
I could lose upto $400 over this (I wasn't expecting this to last this long).
This is primarily going to cost you time. I don't know how exactly into how much money this translates, though...
Hi olsen,
This is going to be explained in another thread.
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olsen wrote:
Quote:
PIO0 is 3.3 Megs a second max, that's how I got the ~188 hrs and 35 minutes that it should have taken to finish. I used the highest speed it could do to divide by, as my AmigaOne is not doing anything else.
So you have the slowest disk access method possible, on a really large disk, for which each block is rewritten seven times over, and each write operation results in a disk access which does not go through the write cache. Ouch. There really should be a "Cancel" button and a progress display in the partitioning tool.
Hehe.
Yes, unfortunately there isn't. But, I could see if they did not have a progress bar on say the first 2 passes, but did on the subsequent ones, making sense.
I'm not sure if canceling would be safe to do? Half formatted and the rest not? Could that work out? I don't know.
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olsen wrote: Quote:
Well, it's still not finished as the hard drive light is still flickering. I know I shouldn't turn it off while it's read/writing. Any ideas as to what to do next?
Hopefully, it's just not done yet??
Since you were trying to low-level format the drive anyway, what's the harm of rebooting the machine? It's not as you'd lose any data.
Incidentally, the "blanking" option was intended to make the data on the drive unrecoverable before you sell it or throw it away. It's not particularly useful in any other situation.
Well, I thought it was necessary to get the Amiga OS file system on there.
Here's the deal, say it's already formatted from the manufacturer, I figured it would be formatted to accept the most common operating system in the world, that being windos fat32 or ntfs. So it would have to be reformatted for AOS FFS or whatever other file system one wants to use.
Hi TetiSoft,
Thank you. I didn't know that.
Hi Jack,
I'm afraid of 1. Disrupting the progress done so far, and 2. Since the light is flickering, of the read/write head crashing if I cut the power and being destroyed and/or damaging the hard disk surface.
Support Amiga Fantasy cases!!! How to program: 1. Start with lots and lots of 0's. 10. Add 1's, liberally. "Details for OS 5 will be made public in the fourth quarter of 2007, ..." - Bill McEwen Whoah!!! He spoke, a bit late.
Some time between 11 am Sun. (9 days, 18 hrs) and 3 am Mon. (10 days, 10 hrs) the hard drive light stopped flickering and now I have the following on the screen:
A requester appeared and this is what it says.
Title of requester "Secure disk blank function"
Text of requester: "Are you sure you want to perform a secure blank operation on the WHOLE disk? ALL your data will be permanently lost, beyond any possible repair operation." "Yes" "No"
What should I do? I thought it WAS doing the formatting already?!
It's a new disk, I don't have anything on there that will be lost.
Support Amiga Fantasy cases!!! How to program: 1. Start with lots and lots of 0's. 10. Add 1's, liberally. "Details for OS 5 will be made public in the fourth quarter of 2007, ..." - Bill McEwen Whoah!!! He spoke, a bit late.
PIO0 is 3.3 Megs a second max, that's how I got the ~188 hrs and 35 minutes that it should have taken to finish. I used the highest speed it could do to divide by, as my AmigaOne is not doing anything else.
So you have the slowest disk access method possible, on a really large disk, for which each block is rewritten seven times over, and each write operation results in a disk access which does not go through the write cache. Ouch. There really should be a "Cancel" button and a progress display in the partitioning tool.
Hehe.
Yes, unfortunately there isn't. But, I could see if they did not have a progress bar on say the first 2 passes, but did on the subsequent ones, making sense.
I'm not sure if canceling would be safe to do? Half formatted and the rest not? Could that work out? I don't know.
A little story on hardware history may be in order here. I'm quietly assuming you are not aware of what "formatting" a hard disk drive means today, so please forgive me if I'm repeating common knowledge.
Let's say the year is 1987: you've got a blank floppy disk and a hard disk controller attached to a brand new 20 MByte hard disk drive which you brought home from the shop. You want to make both usable for your Amiga. What you need to do for that is format them.
The floppy disk needs to be formatted because since it came out of the factory, nobody stored any information on it. The hard disk drive needs to be low-level formatted using the hard disk partitioning tool, because since the day the hard disk drive came out of the factory nobody stored any information on it either.
In both cases you are really low-level formatting a magnetic storage medium. And in both cases the low-level formatting process did something to the respective storage medium which helped the respective disk controllers to access the data. It organized the storage medium, breaking it down into tracks, blocks and sectors, which is something the disk controller hardware can't do all by itself. It needs the low-level formatting to (so to speak) draw chalk lines around the individual storage units.
So, low-level formatting helps the hardware make sense of the storage medium. The next following step would be to help the software, typically a file system which needs to know where partitions begin and end, make sense of the storage medium. This is what the Amiga "HDToolbox" and "Format" commands will do.
Please keep in mind that these two steps (low-level formatting is needed by the disk controller, partitioning and formatting is needed by the file system) always used to be necessary in around 1985/1987 for magnetic storage media.
Times change: flash forward to 2007, some twenty odd years later. While formatting floppy disks still works almost exactly like it did in 1987 (the technology is so old/robust that it doesn't change with the times) something happened to how hard disk drives work. For a start, we now have much larger hard disks than we used to have, and they are much cheaper, too.
What made these cheaper, much larger hard disks possible was (among other things) a change in how data is recorded on the storage medium. You no longer have to give the hard disk controller hardware hints as to how the disk is structured. The manufacturer takes care of that before the disk is even shipped to you. Consequently, you can only partition the hard disk and format the partitions, a low-level format is no longer possible or even necessary.
Quote:
Quote:
olsen wrote: Quote:
Well, it's still not finished as the hard drive light is still flickering. I know I shouldn't turn it off while it's read/writing. Any ideas as to what to do next?
Hopefully, it's just not done yet??
Since you were trying to low-level format the drive anyway, what's the harm of rebooting the machine? It's not as you'd lose any data.
Incidentally, the "blanking" option was intended to make the data on the drive unrecoverable before you sell it or throw it away. It's not particularly useful in any other situation.
Well, I thought it was necessary to get the Amiga OS file system on there.
No, it's not necessary. What the partitioning software does is limited to writing the partitioning scheme to the disk, which puts a certain structure on the disk. This process merely changes what's stored on the disk, and no previously existing disk structure will prevent the process from succeeding. This is not like it used to be in 1987 for floppy disks formatted on an IBM system which had to be reformatted on the Amiga to be useful. Today's hard disks are always in low-level formatted state.
Quote:
Here's the deal, say it's already formatted from the manufacturer, I figured it would be formatted to accept the most common operating system in the world, that being windos fat32 or ntfs. So it would have to be reformatted for AOS FFS or whatever other file system one wants to use.
Right idea, but merely putting a new partitioning scheme on the disk and then formatting each partition with the "Quick" option will do the job. There is no need to erase the information previously stored on the disk first.
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I'm afraid of 1. Disrupting the progress done so far, and 2. Since the light is flickering, of the read/write head crashing if I cut the power and being destroyed and/or damaging the hard disk surface.
In 1987 cutting the power while your hard disk's read/write head was still accessing the medium could result in mechanical damage. Today's hard drive mechanics are safer, and you need physical force (like throwing or dropping a drive) to cause damage. You should be safe by merely rebooting the machine.
Once the machine restarts, pick up where you left off: set up a partitioning scheme, write it to disk, then format the individual partitions. Don't use the blanking/wiping process.
Some time between 11 am Sun. (9 days, 18 hrs) and 3 am Mon. (10 days, 10 hrs) the hard drive light stopped flickering and now I have the following on the screen:
A requester appeared and this is what it says.
Title of requester "Secure disk blank function"
Text of requester: "Are you sure you want to perform a secure blank operation on the WHOLE disk? ALL your data will be permanently lost, beyond any possible repair operation." "Yes" "No"
What should I do? I thought it WAS doing the formatting already?!
What you should do is complain about what the partitioning software asks you to confirm without giving much of a hint as what is going on, and why. Next thing, you should click on "No" unless you want to spend another 1-2 weeks waiting for the partitioning software to return control to you.
Quote:
It's a new disk, I don't have anything on there that will be lost.
Maybe not on the disk, but you already lost some ten days you're not likely to get back any time soon...
I selected "no" when it asked me to proceed with the low level formatting.
It also asked where I wanted to save some file it generated, but didn't tell what I needed it for, or what it should be called. I didn't save it.
So, I went back to the partitioning part of Media Toolbox, got 4 partitions made, and thank goodness, the entire amount of HD space was still available....
It started me at DH4:, but I changed that to DH2:, because my first HD had DH0: and DH1:. So I made DH2:, DH3:, DH4:, and DH5:.
Then I formatted DH2: from the shell (that wasn't apparent that I had to do that from Media Toolbox), anyway, it couldn't put the trashcan on there.
Then info couldn't see it. I was told to reboot it, on IRC.
Still not there, HOWEVER, there is a linux install on my 1st hard drive, and now UBoot doesn't give me the option to boot into linux any more.
I don't know how many partitions are on my first HD, but could I have a DH_: naming conflict going on? I might have formatted Linux off of there??
Support Amiga Fantasy cases!!! How to program: 1. Start with lots and lots of 0's. 10. Add 1's, liberally. "Details for OS 5 will be made public in the fourth quarter of 2007, ..." - Bill McEwen Whoah!!! He spoke, a bit late.
Severin, thank you sooo much for getting my hard drive to appear and getting the partitions formatted on the IRC channel!!!!!!!!
Problem is solved.
There was something that I kept over looking that would have kept the hard drive from ever appearing on the workbench.
Support Amiga Fantasy cases!!! How to program: 1. Start with lots and lots of 0's. 10. Add 1's, liberally. "Details for OS 5 will be made public in the fourth quarter of 2007, ..." - Bill McEwen Whoah!!! He spoke, a bit late.
Recent hard drives doesn't need low level formating and should never be low level formated by users.
there is no "cancel" button on low level formating just because a canceled low level formating (by a cancel button pressed, rebooting the computer, or switch it off) will KILL the hard drive for good. simple.
It is impossible to restart a low level format on such a killed drive because it appears to have NO SECTORS and ZERO blocks.
Amigalement, Jean-Francois Bachelet, Amiga nuts since 1985 ----------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to Happy Computing : AMIGA! (C)2K4-2K99 voxel
Recent hard drives doesn't need low level formating and should never be low level formated by users.
there is no "cancel" button on low level formating just because a canceled low level formating (by a cancel button pressed, rebooting the computer, or switch it off) will KILL the hard drive for good. simple.
It is impossible to restart a low level format on such a killed drive because it appears to have NO SECTORS and ZERO blocks.
Yikes, this doesn't make great sense, does it? New drives don't need to be low-level formatted because the techniques employed in recording information on them no longer makes low level formatting in the old manner (say, 15-20 years ago) necessary. And you couldn't do it if you wanted to anyway.
And a low-level format taking 1-2 weeks is very unlikely. If the disk controller really took control of the medium and did a low-level format (which it doesn't) it should be faster than that. Much of the time in formatting a drive is spent on transferring data between the computer storing the data and the drive.
My guess is that the missing cancel button, etc. for the process related above is due to the fact that the feature came late to the partitioning software and it's a chore to update the GUI.
And as for "aborting a low level format will kill your drive", I think that's a myth. First, you can't low level format a modern hard disk drive any more in the first place. Second, if you can't do that, then you can't abort the process. Third, if you can't abort it then you can't do damage to the drive.
I can say that the drive is killed as I tryied a low level format on a 1GB HD (a long time ago, when 1GB HDs costed a small fortume : 1996) and suffered a power loss
when I could power back my Amiga the HD was electricaly OK but showed 0 Block, 0 sectors, 0 tracks and I never could use it since : impossible to low level format it again. and I tryied a lot of time with all the formating software I could find...
so it's not a myth at all, it's reality.
BTW, you're right, it was a scsi drive.
Amigalement, Jean-Francois Bachelet, Amiga nuts since 1985 ----------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to Happy Computing : AMIGA! (C)2K4-2K99 voxel
I can say that the drive is killed as I tryied a low level format on a 1GB HD (a long time ago, when 1GB HDs costed a small fortume : 1996) and suffered a power loss
when I could power back my Amiga the HD was electricaly OK but showed 0 Block, 0 sectors, 0 tracks and I never could use it since : impossible to low level format it again. and I tryied a lot of time with all the formating software I could find...
so it's not a myth at all, it's reality.
"Was", not "is". We were talking about "modern" IDE hard disk drives, and even the technology used ten years ago in making large storage devices has evolved greatly since. I'd say that if you have a drive that's smaller than 4-6 GBytes and was manufactured before 1998-2000 then you have an "old" type of drive. And these old drives would tend to be mechanically less robust, and overall reliability was lower.
Things changed as the market for these devices exploded after the late 1990'ies. There was greater demand, and the greater demand fueled research. The research gave us what we have today, and while what we have today still works within the I/O framework that already existed almost 20 years ago, almost everything else has changed.
For example, modern drives make extensive use of error detection and correction, and one bit of stored information may be spread over several recorded bits: the storage hardware reconstructs the originally stored bit by counting how many recorded bits agree upon it. Also, modern drives store their firmware on the disk rather than in an EPROM. When you power up a drive, the drive loads its firmware from the disk. If the firmware stored on the disk is damaged, and even if the remainder of the disk is still OK, you still won't be able to read data from the disk. Not even if you transfer the electronics from a different disk to your damaged one.
Quote:
BTW, you're right, it was a scsi drive.
No surprise there. IDE drives ceased to respond to low-level formatting requests a long time ago. Part of that may have initially been motivated to pretend that the drives were more reliable than really was the case.
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