Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[Daedalus]

There are plenty of utilities for reading the SMART details of a drive that can give an indication of the health of the drive and if it's likely to fail. Most Linux distros have a good SMART status reader built into their disk utility that can list lots of details, always good to have on a live CD. It can't catch everything of course - sometimes a drive just doesn't turn on one day, no warning and nothing you can do.

[Marcuz]

Larger screenshot please?

[-Acid-]

Originally Posted by volvo_0ne

HDToolbox-> Low Level Format

What EXACTLY did it do?

In the day I did it, and then formatted, WHY?

Because the next time I decided to format my drive (as ya do), it made no difference whatsoever.

Make sure never to do that on an IDE drive if you ever want to use it again!

[zipper]

No modern drive should accept a low level format.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by volvo_0ne

HDToolbox-> Low Level Format

What EXACTLY did it do?

Low Level Format means something different today than it did originally. Other posters explained well what it used to mean but today it just means zero-filling all sectors of the drive, so in essence wiping it back to factory defaults with no partitions. This will in turn also enable the firmware to detect and remap any faulty sectors as they are passed by the format.

On SSDs a low level format could mean secure erase which is releasing all flash cells. This also restores the drive to the original state.

[Toni Wilen]

HDToolBox Low Level Format does nothing interesting. It never did. (I checked it long time ago, don't remember details but I think it rewrites/erases the RDB, possibly some older versions did normal full format).

Anyway, there is no Low Level Format IDE or SCSI command. It is just another Amiga harddrive myth.

Low Level Format option was probably originally designed for XT or MFM drives.

[zipper]

And not used after about 1990.

[appiah4]

How good was the Wing Commander A500 port? I remember being incredibly pissed off at the PC Master Race back in the day because they claimed the OCS was incapable of running the game..

When it was released, though, I never bothered to check..

[ajk]

I liked Wing Commander, but it is rather slow on an A500. And on expanded systems it can be kind of fast (without patches)

[DisposableHero]

They were right to think the A500 couldn't do the texture mapped graphics of Wing Commander at any kind of playable speed (even with a space setting, so mostly-blank backdrops). A few people tried it, nobody succeeded. On an A1200 or above it was fine though, we could have had a lot more done with the style.

[rockape]

Hi,

Ref Low Level Formatting a Hard Drive.

See http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/Irritate/Irritate.html

Quote

Q. Will low-level formatting ruin my hard drive?

A. Maybe, but probably not.

On a few old IDE drives, it might. Most recent IDE drives simply ignore the low-level format command and pretend they did it.

For SCSI, you should generally not need to low-level format the drive (and some SCSI drives ignore the command, too).

If you must do a low-level format, make sure there are no power interruptions and that you give it adequate time to finish. A full low-level format can take quite a while, half an hour or more for large or slow drives."


Regards, Michael

aka rockape

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by rockape

See http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/Irritate/Irritate.html

Don't. It has usual assumptions and myths, including extremely popular max transfer myth. (No, it isn't drive bug!)

I repeat: there is no low level SCSI or IDE format command! HDtoolbox does not use any special SCSI commands.

EDIT: Max transfer and low level format are probably the 2 most popular Amiga myths. Someone really should search all old BBS posts etc.. to find the origin for both myths!

[Twiggy]

Why don't PSX adaptor CD32 controllers work with the Unofficial CD32 ports? Will they ever be supported?

[idrougge]

Probably because they don't correctly implement the CD32 pad.

[Twiggy]

Forgive my lack of understanding, but if they support however many buttons, isn't that implementation enough?

[spannernick]

I always ask stupid questions...I'm with stupid..

Why this...why that...If you don't ask you not get..

Like Why did Jack leave Commodore and make the Atari ST like updated version of the C64..?? If you listen to the music of the ATARI ST some of it sounds like the C64..and the OS called TOS looks like Geo64. Dam copycats..

Sorry it's not Amiga related.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by twiggy

Forgive my lack of understanding, but if they support however many buttons, isn't that implementation enough?

It's not how many buttons you have, but how they are read by the system.
If you care much, you can find a thread here talking about how different a 2 button Master System pad is from a Genesis pad and why they have to be read differently. It's a bit technical, but there's a difference.

So basically, there are TWO ways to read multiple buttons on an Amiga joystick port, and you cannot have code that supports both at the same time. I'm not exactly sure why these adapters don't work, what I can guess is that many of these ports use WHDLoad slaves and those slaves are usually made with Master System or Genesis code in them for a 2 button joystick.

[s2325]

Why there is information about both sides when you don't need to swap? http://hol.abime.net/1385/diskscan

[Jope]

An ignorant art director made the label. Many 8-bit formats had flippable disks / cassettes and the same people did the labels for all of them.

[DisposableHero]

It's not technically wrong, just a detail that's hidden from the user. A good job Amigas had double-sided drives from the start, unlike STs.