Bruce Esquibel wrote:

> Never low level format an scsi drive, especially seagate. You sent a
> command to the drive which basically made a zombie out of it.

Certainly not. LL-Format is part of the SCSI spec, and it does no harm to
any SCSI disk drive. If a drive dies during a low-level format it would have
died under normal operation, too.

> Not sure of the mechanics of it but this was a trap since the 15150's
> came out (barracuda). The drives used to have been sent back to
> Seagate for repair. Never found anything to bring them back to life.

Then the drives have been faulty before. I have a bunch of Seagate ST15150s
here, most of them with Sun label, that have been low-level formatted
numerous times. At work we have hundreds of disks that also get erased
regularly by low-level format. Not a single one had a failure that can be
tracked back to a ll-format...

The rumor of ll-format destroying disks still sticks like glue but without
any data or evidence that supports it. This rumor basically comes from the
very old days of the first generation of IDE drives where a low-level format
destroyed the servo informations and rendered the disk unuseable. That's not
the case any more since EIDE drives (bigger than 540MB) became standard, and
it was never a problem for SCSI...

Benjamin