When IDE disks get bad blocks, you have to write to the bad blocks to
get the drive firmware to remap them.  To reformat the entire drive, you
could write to every block on the disk, I suppose.  I usually use dd for
ide block correction.  Then, I run fsck and hope it's not too bad.

-Brian


On Sep 22,  6:09pm, der Mouse wrote:
} Subject: formatting IDE disk?
} I have a laptop disk which seems to have developed a bad spot.  Can
} anyone tell me how to reformat the drive?  Or is that not done on IDE
} drives, and all I can do is partition around the bad spot?
} 
} The drive is
} 
} wd1 at pciide0 channel 1 drive 0: <TOSHIBA MK6409MAV>
} wd1: drive supports 16-sector pio transfers, lba addressing
} wd1: 6194 MB, 13424 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 12685680 sectors
} wd1: 32-bits data port
} wd1: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 2
} 
} (this comes from my i386 desktop machine, to which the drive is
} currently connected with a laptop<->desktop adapter).  I looked at
} atactl, but even in -current it doesn't seem to have an option to
} reformat a drive.
} 
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