BBC News - Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users
"By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that
changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.

The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive
makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.

However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old
drive for one using the changed format. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8557144.stm

On Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:28:08 -0500, Yousuf Khan
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>BBC News - Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users
>"By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that
>changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.
>
>The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive
>makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.
>
>However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old
>drive for one using the changed format. "
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8557144.stm

Is there any way to do a low-level format on an older drive so that it
now has 4K sectors?

Way, way, way back when. Floppy diskette sectors started out at 128B,
the moved to 256B. IBM pioneered 512B sectors when they brought out
the PC in 1981. Of course, with the right parameters sent to the FD
1765 controller chip, any system could read the 512B sector diskettes.

Andrew Hamilton <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:28:08 -0500, Yousuf Khan
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>>BBC News - Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users
>>"By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that
>>changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.
>>
>>The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive
>>makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.
>>
>>However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old
>>drive for one using the changed format. "
>>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8557144.stm

> Is there any way to do a low-level format on an older drive so that it
> now has 4K sectors?

Well, you could try that together with a firmware patch for an
old MFM drive ;-)

Seriously, no. Even while SCSI drives theoretically can do this,
in practice they just lump sectors together and emulate the larger
ones.

> Way, way, way back when. Floppy diskette sectors started out at 128B,
> the moved to 256B. IBM pioneered 512B sectors when they brought out
> the PC in 1981. Of course, with the right parameters sent to the FD
> 1765 controller chip, any system could read the 512B sector diskettes.

Floppies have stepper motors, which makes software formatting very
easy. Modern HDDs have a linear morto type that has stepless
positioning. (The mentioned MFM drives also used stepper motors.)

That means AFAIK modern HDDs cannot be formatted by themselves,
but this is either done with extra head or with positioning
support equipment only attached to the drive in manufacturing.


Arno
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WD has a utility to align for XP.

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On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:44:12 -0800 Ed Light <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
Message id: <4b9a44ff$0$10555$(E-Mail Removed)>:

>WD has a utility to align for XP.

Yup, and the current version of the utility won't work on an uninitialized
drive. I had to connect it to a USB adapter and initialize it on a system
running XP before the utility would see the drive.

Andrew Hamilton wrote:
> Is there any way to do a low-level format on an older drive so that it
> now has 4K sectors?

The days of low-level formatting are long gone.

> Way, way, way back when. Floppy diskette sectors started out at 128B,
> the moved to 256B. IBM pioneered 512B sectors when they brought out
> the PC in 1981. Of course, with the right parameters sent to the FD
> 1765 controller chip, any system could read the 512B sector diskettes.

That's because the controllers for those devices were basically the
system's CPU itself. These days they have their own intelligence, and
it's more like a couple of peers talking over a network these days.

Yousuf Khan

In message <4b9a44ff$0$10555$(E-Mail Removed)> Ed Light
<(E-Mail Removed)> was claimed to have wrote:

>WD has a utility to align for XP.

That will work for the first generation 4KB drives that emulate 512byte
sectors, but not once 4KB comes out in native mode.

Andrew Hamilton wrote
> Yousuf Khan<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote

>> BBC News - Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users
>> "By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that
>> changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.

>> The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers
>> to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.

>> However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users
>> who swap an old drive for one using the changed format. "
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8557144.stm

No reason why it cant use standard 512 byte LBAs to the system its connected to.

> Is there any way to do a low-level format on
> an older drive so that it now has 4K sectors?

Nope, not with standard ATA and SATA drives.

> Way, way, way back when. Floppy diskette sectors started out at 128B,
> the moved to 256B. IBM pioneered 512B sectors when they brought out
> the PC in 1981. Of course, with the right parameters sent to the FD
> 1765 controller chip, any system could read the 512B sector diskettes.

There is no separate controller with hard drives, that functionality is on the drive itself.

DevilsPGD wrote:
> Ed Light <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote

>> WD has a utility to align for XP.

> That will work for the first generation 4KB drives that emulate
> 512byte sectors, but not once 4KB comes out in native mode.

You dont know that they wont be able to appear to have
512 byte sectors but just have those as part of 4K sectors.

Its perfectly possible for the drive to look like its got 512 byte sectors but actually has 4K sectors on the platters.

Andrew Hamilton <(E-Mail Removed)> kenjka:
> Is there any way to do a low-level format on an older drive so that it
> now has 4K sectors?

Yup... Try SCSITool...

But, note that I did this once and it somehow lowered the visible capacity
of a drive, I believe it has something to do with counting blocks in Windows
because Windows know to work with 512 byte drives only...

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