At 06:38 AM 4/17/1998 Earl Truss wrote:
>
>Back in the days before IDE hard drives, we were told that if you wanted to
>put a computer case on edge, you should reformat the hard disk in the new
>position.  This was (in theory) because gravity pulling sideways on the
>drive mechanism would affect the head alignment.  I don't know if this was
>true at the time or if so if it is still true.


Earl writes of the old advice for stepper motor hard drives (which
one should reformat every year anyway, since wear introduces
tolerance in the mechanics used to align the heads).

Most (I want to say all but one never knows) modern hard drives
have voice coil actuated heads and align the tracks from reading
the surface of the platters.

One should never low level format an IDE drive unless one uses
software specifically designed to low level format the drive in
question (do NOT use the CMOS formatter on IDE drives). IDEs
are translated drives which do not physically sector the platters the
way DOS expects. You have to use the proper command set for
the particular IDE drive.

Regards,

John Chin