k4sb@avana.net wrote:
> Seagate told me they do not sell parts, nor do they repair HDs. So what I'm
> going to get
> is a new one when I ship it tomorrow. They also told me the method some of
> you suggested
> would not work because the cb had the old drive info ( fat? ) in one of the
> cb chips...
> that slowed me down until I said, "whoa"...the FATs on the disks...it might
> read the FAT
> into a chip, but no way is it permanently stored there...
Sorry this is so late- have been off the reflector for a while due to
work load.
What you did is very good but may not be perfect, so thought I would add
some information.
What is stored on the circuit board is not the FAT, but the disk sector
map. The disk sector map is used to store information on bad sectors on
the disk - areas where you cannot reliably store infomation in the
magnetic (or optical for the new read write CD ROMS) media itself. This
table is what is created when you do a low level format from FDISK, and
it over writes all info on the disk. The disk sector map is what the one
board electronics uses to know wher to tell the fat table it can store
info.
The worst thing that "may" have happened is that one of the files
specified in the FAT may not get a sector that the new drive controller
might have mapped as a bad sector. It is unlikely that this occurred as
the media in new drives is almost always 100% perfect, so you have a
viable solution. On older drives this was not case and you could wind up
with missed data when old FAT table pointed to a sector that was mapped
as bad.
I was going to try what you did on a drive I lost, but the drive was out
of production and I could never find an identical one to try switching
the boards.
de n0yvy steve
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