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Having issues formatting MFM drive on XT 5160 with bad sectors.

twolazy

twolazy

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So I finally got around to getting the new controller (Everex EV-390 bios 3.92) into the XT, and trying to get the hard drive to boot. So far, I have been able to create a 1mb partition, with few errors. I can get that to boot fine.

Problem I have is the drive has at least 1.4mb of bad sectors, over the entire drive. If I try to FDISK it into a single partition (20mb), and use MSDOS 6 format utility, the format utility errors out after around 20 or so errors (about 3mb) and refuses to continue. I can get an old version of Spinrite to boot, and go through the drive, flagging the bad sectors on the partition. I cannot get any further with a high level format thus far.

Does anyone know of a way around this? I've had this drive formatted on MSDOS 6 before, on a 386 (WD WAH-1003 controller). Yes it had the same amount of bad sectors as it does now, # hasn't changed (albeit a different controller) . Track 0 is fine as I can format the first 1mb no issues other then a few bad tracks (8 bad total).

Any ideas be it software or otherwise to help me get the drive fully formatted? Pulling my hair out all night LOL.
 
Some drivers/controllers/drives had the ability to divert bad sectors to preallocated "spare" areas. Meant a big hit on performance, but it worked on really ratty drives.
 
Under some circumstances, such as large IDE drives, the DOS 5/6 format tool will not verify the entire drive, but I don't know that there is any way to force that.

There is probably some third party tool that will format hard drives, but let you skip the verification step. But I can't think of a specific one off hand. Might see what SpeedStor does, perhaps Norton Utilities or PC tools. Actually, even if it does not skip verification, something like that might handle more bad sectors.

If all else fails, perhaps set up an emulator with the same hard drive geometry and then copy the first few tracks with the MBR/boot sector/FAT. (Norton Utilities diskeditor will let you save a sector range to a file and write a sector range from a file back to disk). Then you can run a disk tester.
 
Are we talking about LLF or DOS format? LLF has nothing to do with the version of DOS. As a matter of fact, you could write a boot sector that would invoke the BIOS LLF with no DOS anywhere. Sounds as if your media is slowly disintegrating.
 
ST251 said:
Have you tried SpeedStor? I would use that and attempt to reinitialize the drive
Click to expand...
Not yet but I will give it a shot. I ended up using LLF in debug with no issues, before trying to format with dos high level format.

Chuck(G) said:
Some drivers/controllers/drives had the ability to divert bad sectors to preallocated "spare" areas. Meant a big hit on performance, but it worked on really ratty drives.
Click to expand...
Beginning to wonder if that is whats going on, and the controller only has enough space for 20 or so bad sectors/tracks.

andy said:
You could try formatting it with a different version of DOS.
Click to expand...
I think when I had it on the 386, I originally formatted it for dos 5.0. Worth a shot I guess.

Chuck(G) said:
Are we talking about LLF or DOS format? LLF has nothing to do with the version of DOS. As a matter of fact, you could write a boot sector that would invoke the BIOS LLF with no DOS anywhere. Sounds as if your media is slowly disintegrating.
Click to expand...
Before I got the drive, sadly it was moved around a bit without being parked. The drive itself is pretty stable, been using it past year with a different machine, with no change in # of bad sectors/tracks.

So basically I need a high level (dos) format tool that doesn't have verification, or ability to turn it off.
 
twolazy said:
Not yet but I will give it a shot. I ended up using LLF in debug with no issues, before trying to format with dos high level format.


Beginning to wonder if that is whats going on, and the controller only has enough space for 20 or so bad sectors/tracks.


I think when I had it on the 386, I originally formatted it for dos 5.0. Worth a shot I guess.


Before I got the drive, sadly it was moved around a bit without being parked. The drive itself is pretty stable, been using it past year with a different machine, with no change in # of bad sectors/tracks.

So basically I need a high level (dos) format tool that doesn't have verification, or ability to turn it off.
Click to expand...
If you run speedstor's initialize command followed by the defect locking command hopefully that'll make it so that you can format a partition. worst case, speedstor also allows you to create partitions.
 
twolazy said:
So basically I need a high level (dos) format tool that doesn't have verification, or ability to turn it off.
Click to expand...
DOS 'groups' the many sectors on a drive into clusters. (A cluster contains a certain number of sectors.) DOS allocates clusters (a DOS thing) to files for data storage.

When DOS's FORMAT is run, FORMAT knows that there may be bad sectors on the drive, and it needs to know where they are, because DOS does not want to allocate an unusable/unreliable cluster to a file. For that reason, FORMAT reads the disk's sectors, and if it encounters a 'bad' sector, marks the associated cluster (a DOS thing) as bad.

So as I see it, what you need is a high-level formatting tool that still reads the sectors (and marking clusters as bad as applicable), but does not abort when it reaches what can be described as 'excessive bad sectors encountered - hardware is clearly unreliable'.

andy said:
You could try formatting it with a different version of DOS.
Click to expand...
twolazy said:
I think when I had it on the 386, I originally formatted it for dos 5.0. Worth a shot I guess.
Click to expand...
Perhaps the 'abort' behaviour was introduced after DOS 5.
 
So had to go out and fix buddys XT, but back home, with a ton of new vinyl, woot!

Anywho, I found a utility I am going to try tomorrow, called GDisk. It formats and creates partitions. If that doesn't work, I will try using an earlier version of MSDOS. Maybe that is indeed the issue here. Also, notice for the crystals show up today, costing more for postage due then I paid. Meh.

In any event, Stay tuned!
 
So finally had some free time to work on a few projects, and wanted to touch base back on the situation.


I have gotten the drive to finally format, by LLF'ing a few times. Then I changed interleave to 4, and LLF'ed again a few times. Afterward, I used a copy of PC-Tools to high level format the drive. Now the drive is working. Currently running Norton Disk Doctor for the 3rd time, to flag any bad sectors. Figured I update in case others have a similar situation, where too many bad sectors cause Msdos Format or other utilities to fail.

God bless Goteks (with Flash Floppy firmware! Ended up buying a second one since I didn't want to tear my Compaq Portable apart. Now to find a working Tandon 360kb drive...

Also wanted to add, I found the Everex utilities for the EV390/391 if anyone needs them. Those were the key to getting it to LLF correctly. The Debug g=C800:5 format utility in rom was very basic and don't allow the user to change interleave. It would only do an interleave of 3. Somehow an interleave of 4 fixed track 0.
 
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twolazy said:
Currently running Norton Disk Doctor for the 3rd time, to flag any bad sectors.
Click to expand...
I think that NDD only flags clusters as 'bad'.
At [here], 'unusable' rather than 'bad' has been used, i.e. "Clusters containing bad sectors were marked unusable with the reserved value 0xFF7 in the FAT."

twolazy said:
Also wanted to add, I found the Everex utilities for the EV390/391 if anyone needs them.
Click to expand...
Are they later than the version 3.0 at [here] ?

twolazy said:
Somehow an interleave of 4 fixed track 0.
Click to expand...
Maybe it was co-incidental.
 
LLF formatting flags bad clusters with a field in the ID header, so they're not retried endlessly. Which is why some LLF utilities ask for a defect list. Chances are, however, on these old MFM drives that defects will "creep" and affect the sectors you thought were good.
 
Turns out tools I used were V1... Shame I didn't see the drivers on your site. Somehow google didnt index it properly, because it never showed up in any Everex 390 searches. Did grab them for future use, so thank you.
 
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