Formatting 3b1 hard drives.

[Roger Florkowski]

For those unixpc guru's out there, here are some hard drive questions:

1)    If you want to reformat your hard drive, how do find out which
  hard drive format to use? ie, there are 5-6 different 40 meg choices 
  in the format menu?
     I am aware that if you go into diagnostics s4test, you can type in
  6,12  and it will give information about the drive.  But that only
  provides information about the current format job.  This information
  is incorrect if the drive was (mistakenly) formatted incorrectly.

2)    If a drive has been formatted incorrectly, the bad block table
  typically overflows during a surface test.  How do you then empty the
  bad block table?  Reformatting the disk (again) does not empty it.
  The Enter Bad Blocks option doesn't seem to allow me to delete
  bad block entries.  Actually, the results are questionable, since
  my bad block table has 119 entries, and I have not been able to
  get that budge up or down.

3)    How bullet proof are the unixpc hard drive format/surface test
   routines?  Is it possible that what I am viewing as my own stupid
   mistake might actually be a problem with my drive?  This whole
   adventure actually began when /bin and /dev got munged upon
   in such a way where files/devices aquired very weird attributes
   and permissions.  Parallel Print outs (/dev/lp), were suddenly 
   showing up on another terminal instead of a printer. That's 
   when I shut it down.  So, the hard drive might actually have
   problems.......

Any answers to the above questions would really be appreciated.

-- 
Roger Florkowski				uunet!uvm-gen!banzai!roger
The People's Computer Company			`Revolutionary Programming'