Re: Apple Profile low level formatting on an Apple III

Could you, say, move the shaft on the stepper motor just a little bit, so that in effect you are using new areas on the disk platters?

-Jason

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Ray Arachelian <ray_at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:

>
> alker wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> >
> > thank you very much for your support! Yesterday I finally made it.. I
> > changed the cable, changed the slot for the profile interface card
> > again and now it works!
> >
>
> Congrats! Any chance you can give us some details as how it worked? I
> want to collect this info so that I can update LisaFAQ with it. I did
> see someone previously had success also, but want to make sure I capture
> the experience of a few folks so that the information is as accurate as
> possible.
> > The low level format took only some minutes; all tests passed. Then I
> > put the disk onto my Lisa and initialized and installed MacWorks..
> > when copying system files onto the disk there were errors.. hm, also
> > the drive does not sound so good. Booting up from the drive ended with
> > an error. This surprises me a little bit, because during low level
> > formatting and testing all seemed ok....
> >
> > Is it possbile with some re-low level formatting to get over this
> > troubles? or is the drive simply dead?
> >
> You could do it again, but it sounds the media itself is not very
> stable. If it failed during the installed, it means it wrote some
> pattern during the install all over the disk and then attempted to
> re-read this and couldn't, so those are bad sectors. If you power the
> Lisa down and turn on the Profile by itself, during the first 5 minutes
> or so, it'll attempt to read all of the disk and "spare" the bad blocks
> by replacing them with spare blocks. When the light shows "ready" for a
> few minutes, I'd power it off again, wait a few more minutes and repeat
> this.
>
> I'd then attempt to install again.
>
> Remember that low level formatting will no repair drives with actual bad
> media. All it will do is replace the sync marks, the sector/track ID
> headers for each sector. This is data that is normally never written to
> again, even when you install an OS. So if there was a sector whose
> sector ID information was bad because it got demagnetized, the low level
> format would fix this, but if the physical media is bad, there's nothing
> you can do to repair it, you can at best hope that the Profile will
> notice them and replace them by the sparing process.
>
> I think there's a limit of 32 spare blocks, if you have more than a
> certain number that are bad (might be 32, might be less), you may find
> some OS's such as Lisa Office System will refuse to install since the
> drive isn't reliable.
>
> Here's a stupid question, because I've never done it myself: When you
> did the low level format, was there any option anywhere that said how
> many spare sectors to allocate as spares? I ask because I don't know if
> this hard wired into the drive's ROM or if there's any control over the
> number. I know there's a hard limit in the special block 0xffffe, but
> not sure if there's a way to raise that limit.
> (Even if you could LOS I think asks for the actual number and if it's
> over some fixed number, it'll refuse to install)
>
>
> > http://myretrocomputing.altervista.org/repair_profile/appleprofile.html
> >
> Indeed the above link is one of the other sources of info I was
> collecting for the FAQ and was using the Babelfish translator to
> understand it. :-)
>
>
> >
>

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