bobba84
Veteran Member
Hi guys,
While formatting the Miniscribe 20MB drive in an XT clone I picked up, it started hitting bad sectors about halfway through. Now I know what bad sectors are, and how the system deals with them. But what I don't know is, why did they get the stepper motor to slowly crawl back to track 0 each time it hits one? It seems like a monumental waste of time - with more than a couple bad sectors it changed a 5 minute format into a 30 minute one. I've seen seagate drives do this too - and I already figure it goes back to track 0 so it can try jumping to the track with the bad sector again - I just can't figure out why it would jump to every track in between on it's way back? Can anyone shed some light on this behaviour?
Relevant YouTube video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMJl8Cw2OxM
While formatting the Miniscribe 20MB drive in an XT clone I picked up, it started hitting bad sectors about halfway through. Now I know what bad sectors are, and how the system deals with them. But what I don't know is, why did they get the stepper motor to slowly crawl back to track 0 each time it hits one? It seems like a monumental waste of time - with more than a couple bad sectors it changed a 5 minute format into a 30 minute one. I've seen seagate drives do this too - and I already figure it goes back to track 0 so it can try jumping to the track with the bad sector again - I just can't figure out why it would jump to every track in between on it's way back? Can anyone shed some light on this behaviour?
Relevant YouTube video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMJl8Cw2OxM