Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!ts From: ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Five Facts You Need to Know About Bad IIcx Hard Drives Message-ID: <22601@cup.portal.com> Date: 28 Sep 89 03:22:08 GMT References: <460@eedsp.gatech.edu> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 14 What do you mean by "the drive was already formatted"? If you mean that it already had a Macintosh file system on it, then it may be a used drive, but if you just mean that you could read and write arbitrary blocks without getting errors from the drive, that means nothing. Quantum drives are always formatted. In fact, if you issue a SCSI format command to these drives, it comes back in about five seconds, because all the drive seems to do is re-write the bad block tables and other housekeeping information. ( There is an option one can set in one of the mode select pages that causes it to write a data pattern to every block during a format ). Tim Smith