> AFAIK you can't low-lever format a ZIP disk. I'm not even sure it
> would make sense to do this or why someone would want to do this...
Yes, you can. And it makes sense for bad block remapping. Zip disks
deteriorate gradually when used heavily. I had a problem with one of them
-- one of tracks was unreliable and the drive tried to recover it upon
writes. The symptoms were such that some sectors were being marked as bad
and after a following write they were marked as good again. The drive was
able to read them but needed to recalibrate for a few times to achieve it,
which resulted in these sectors being marked as bad again as a side
effect. And so on.
After formatting the disk, the whole track became marked as bad and I had
no problems with the particular disk ever since. It seems whole track
remapping is performed only upon formatting which is reasonable.
-- + Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland + +--------------------------------------------------------------+ + e-mail: macro@ds2.pg.gda.pl, PGP key available +
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