Re: hard drive trbls

["David Chiu" <none@nowhere.org>]

"David Empson" <dempson@actrix.gen.nz> wrote in message
1em8yfu.5cecno7p8xjxN%dempson@actrix.gen.nz">news:1em8yfu.5cecno7p8xjxN%dempson@actrix.gen.nz...

> According to at one source, this drive has a "maintenance track" which
> contained critical system information required during a format
> operation, and it was probably damaged.  This sort of problem can only
> be fixed by the manufacturer (or possibly someone with the right
> software, which is may require installing a special ROM in the drive
> instead of its normal firmware).

Actually, it may be a bit more extreme than that; most modern drives stores
drive firmware on the disc media itself; although drives that do this
generally have the firmware dupliucated on multiple platters, a specific
sequence of failures can corrupt the drive firmware. I am unsure when
Quantum started doing this, but they have done this to drives at least as
far back as Viking. The flash on the drives contains only the boot code and
mode page settings.

If the said drive falls under this category and you have managed to corrupt
the firmware, the the drive is dead; the firmware can only be restore in a
factory environment. You can probably still use it as a paper weight, or rip
it apart and impress friends with the disc platters and the magnets.

> > When I screwed it up, I must have overlaid the starting track with
> > garbage because now no program will recognize it as a scsi drive.

If you have a PEE CEE (TM) with SCSI card install, you can try the said
drive with it; my own experience has been that PEE CEE (TM) tend to deal
with badily behaving drives a little better than Apple products.