From: Hans Wienen Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: low-level format of msdos partition needed? Date: Tue, 01 Jul 1997 13:40:37 -0700 Organization: Logica BV Lines: 23 Message-ID: <33B96B45.48A9@logica.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 158.234.134.67 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Precedence: bulk Hi, I'm suffering the consequences of trying to convert a linux partition to msdos. As msdos software packets tend to grow and grow, I decided to dedicate another 500 Mb of my harddisk to Gates' products and gracefully had cfdisk repartition my harddisk into two MSDOS volumes (of which one already was DOS, so that nothing changed there), three linux partitions and a linux swap partition. No problem there. But. When I tried to format the new msdos partition, the format programme really screwed up, giving me about 700 k (!) instead of 500M, the rest being "bad sectors". I suppose this is a low-level formatting problem, since if I mount the partition under Linux, it can read it, write it and basically do anything with it you would suspect an operating system ever wanted to do with a hard disk. But dos still gives me about 500 M bad sectors. So, Does anyone know if this is a low-level formatting problem, if a program exists that could reformat my disk or if I'll have to give up?