Low Level Format", Basic Formatting - Dawicontrol DC-29160 U3W Mode D'emploi

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if the drive is partitioned:
determine the number of heads and sectors from the partition data and data
plausibility
otherwise (in the case of invalid or implausible partition data) use the following
standard parameter:
if the capacity is smaller than or equals 1 GByte, set 64 heads and 32 sectors
otherwise (if the capacity exceeds 1GByte) set 255 heads and 63 sectors.
This procedure guarantees that any drive can be operated by the BIOS even if
the drive was previously connected to another host adapter.
If the corresponding drive is managed by the DISKDRV.SYS driver, you need not
worry about the translation mode, as DISKDRV.SYS does not use BIOS notation for
addressing purposes.
Changing the drive parameters makes sense if , for instance, the corresponding
drive is to be operated by another SCSI host adapter which uses a different translation
mode; if you wish to mainly operate the drive on one SCSI host adapter, we
recommend keeping the standard parameters.
To determine the translation mode it is necessary to indicate the number of
sectors and heads, the number of cylinders is the result of dividing the drive capacity
by the product of heads and sectors. The number of sectors must not exceed 63 and
the number of heads must not exceed 255. In all cases the number of cylinders is
limited to 1024, as the BIOS concept of the PC does not admit higher values. This data
is stored as soon as the drive is partitioned afterwards using the selected translation
mode; otherwise the standard parameters are reactivated.

3.3. "Low Level Format", Basic Formatting

This option allows you to carry out a basic formatting of the selected drive.
Usually all SCSI drives have factory basic formatting, so that this function is only
needed in exceptional cases.
Attention: All data and programmes written on the drive are irretrievably lost.
For safety reasons, the programme repeatedly asks for your conformation before
carrying out the formatting procedure, so that unintentional data deletion is prevented.
When formatting, the interleave factor selected by the option "Select Interleave" is
used; if the value is 0, the interleave determined by the drive manufacturer is used.
Depending on the drive capacity, this procedure can take up some time, you should
calculate one minute for 10 MByte capacity. Some drives do not permit low level
formatting, in this case the procedure is either stopped strikingly fast or interrupted at
once by an error message.
Manual