Jason Thorpe sez:
# On Sun, 29 Sep 1996 13:59:46 -0500 (CDT) 
#  Peter Seebach <seebs@solon.com> wrote:
# 
#  > I have an old Sun drive that appears to be getting "non-media hardware
#  > failures", and I thought I'd format it, but I don't know how.

...better known as a flaky on-board disk controller (not the SCSI interface
in the machine, but the little disk-drive-sized PCB piggybacked on the
drive itself).

# 
# ...but I'm not sure a low-level format will fix this anyhow...

Find another drive on which the drive is bad but the controller is
good, swap controllers, and re-format your disk ("There's a hole in the
bucket" :-).

				--*greywolf;