Re: Vulcan HD Breakthru

[salfter@salfter.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter)]

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In article <3c8482c6@news.svn.net>, Paul Grammens <grammens@svn.net> wrote:
>First, I have some drives from old PC's  that are identical to my Vulcan's
>stock drive, so I knew they would work. They didn't work at first, the
>Vulcan Partion Manager couldn't save the partion info. I had to use an
>ancient PC util called HDTEST to "low-level format" the drives first.

Odds are you only needed to wipe the drive.  A Linux boot floppy will do
that for you...the bootdisk/rootdisk pair used by Slackware will work.  (If
you have Linux installed on a machine, of course, you could just shut it
down and hook the drive in temporarily).  If you know the drive's geometry,
figure the number of blocks on it and wipe it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd[x] bs=512 count=[y]

where [x] is
  a for primary master
  b for primary slave
  c for secondary master
  d for secondary slave
and [y] is the number of blocks.  This will write 0s all over the drive. 
(You might find that just writing a meg or two of zeroes is enough...when a
partitioning utility decides to get stupid on me, wiping the beginning of
the drive is usually enough to get it going again.)

  _/_
 / v \  Scott Alfter (salfter@salfter.dyndns.org)
(IIGS(  http://salfter.dyndns.org
 \_^_/  rm -rf /bin/laden
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