Adding hard disks

Formatting hard disks

Some IDE and ESDI hard disks are only partially formatted when received from the factory. This may cause badtrk(ADM) to indicate that every sector past a certain cylinder/head location is bad at installation. You should contact the manufacturer to determine whether the disk is completely formatted.

WARNING: Automatic sector translation means that many IDE hard drives should not be low-level formatted. A formatting utility will not understand the underlying hardware of the drive and may render it useless. Check with the manufacturer of a IDE hard drive before attempting to reformat it.

Some SCSI host adapter controllers (for example, the Adaptec AHA-154x) have a set of BIOS routines that allows you to format or redefine the geometry of a SCSI hard disk. Refer to your hardware documentation for more information.