Diagnostics
Analyzing the Hard Disk Surface
If you do not need to reformat the entire hard disk but want to perform a thorough test of
the media to detect any bad or marginal areas, select F6 to analyze the surface.
Caution: This performs a destructive analysis of the hard disk media (all data
on the hard disk will be erased).
Any bad tracks found during the analysis are automatically added to the bad track table.
As bad tracks are found, they are reformatted as bad so that a subsequent MS-DOS
FORMAT operation does not attempt to use these areas on the disk.
Formatting a New Hard Disk Drive
After installing a new hard disk drive, you should enter the bad track information
provided by the manufacturer into the bad track table (see above). After this is done, press
the F7 key. This option is specifically for formatting a hard disk drive which was
previously unformatted; it performs the following operations.
qEach track of the hard disk is reformatted using the current interleave
value.
qEach track in the bad track table is reformatted as bad so that it cannot
be used.
When the format operation is complete, run a surface analysis to verify that no additional
bad tracks axe found.
Formatting an Already Formatted Hard Disk
If your hard disk was previously formatted, you can press the F8 key to automatically
format preformatted drives. This causes the following operations.
D-14 Diagnostics