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Re: Profile low lever formatting...who're you gonna call?

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

Veritas wrote:


bieling@terra.es (Jorge Chamorro Bieling) wrote:



Profile Hard Drive: Info, Maintenance, and Formatting
by Patrick Schaefer (March, 2000)

Good news first: everything in a Profile is serviceable. The drive
mechanism is a regular Seagate ST506/412 (IBM AT drive),
Low-level Formatting
...
Formatting a Profile requires an Apple ///, some software and a special
formatter chip that replaces the Z8 chip on the logic board. 



The ST506 is an MFM drive. Is it possible to use an old PC, with an
MFM controller, and a PC low level format utility? I think I still
have all this stuff, circa 1985.

Or is the low-level format information for the Profile somehow
different than for a PC?



I expect that it is quite different--along the lines of Disk ][
formatting.


In addition the low level format is specific to one controller.
When installing an MFM disk on a PC it was part of the procedure to do a low level format with the actual controller. This was so because each controller would have slight differences in their timing. (On IDE and SCSI they put the controller on the disk so the controller and the drive is also a pair.) I would guess this is the same on Apple.
Anyhow testing could be done with a PC if the drive is supected of not working (and then low level format again on the Apple). 

Knut