Adding hard disks

Formatting hard disks

Some IDE and ESDI hard disks are only partially formatted when received from the factory. This may cause an indication 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.