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This deletes the logical drive and makes the space it occupied available for you to make another logical drive.

Formatting Physical Drives

You can do low-level formatting of SCSI drives using the BIOS Configuration Utility. Because most SCSI disk drives are low-level formatted at the factory, this step is usually not necessary. Usually, you must format a disk if:

The disk drive was not low-level formatted at the factory, or

An excessive number of media errors have been detected on the disk drive.

Media Errors

Perform the following steps to view the media errors for the drive to be formatted.

1Select Objects—>Physical Drives from the Management Menu.

2Select the Physical Drives option, and choose a device.

3Press <F2>.

The View Drive Information screen displays. The error count displays at the bottom of the properties screen. If you feel that the number of errors is excessive, you should probably format the disk drive. If more than 32 media errors were detected, PERC 3 automatically puts the drive in FAIL state. This occurs even in a degraded RAID set. The errors display as they occur. When there are errors, formatting the drive can clear up the problem.

You do not have to choose Format to erase existing information on your SCSI disks, such as a DOS partition. That information is erased when you initialize logical drives.

Formatting Drives

You can format the physical drives using:

Batch Formatting. The Format option in the PERC 3 BIOS Configuration Utility main menu lets you format up to eight disk drives simultaneously.

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PERC 3 BIOS Configuration Utility

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Dell 3 manual Formatting Physical Drives, Media Errors, Formatting Drives