On 11 Mar 2003, at 9:35, Rob Shane wrote:

>     I boot into dos and go to fdisk to try and delete the partion on a
> SCSI hard drive. Everything appears to go ok until i restart the computer
> and the partions are still there, same size and volume labels. One
> primary and the other extended dos. I am even unable to just delete the
> logical drive.
>     I can however format the logical drive but have no access to the
> primary partion. I get the message "Drive is not formated, do you want to
> format now?" I try to format it and it doesn't complete. Windows tells me
> that it was not able to complete the format and when trying to do it from
> dos all i get it "Abort, Retry, Fail" at the prompt.

  The general advice on IDE/ATAPI drives is that they should not be low-
level formatted by end users.

  The opposite is often true with SCSI.  More than once, I've had a SCSI
drive fail to work correctly with a SCSI controller *until* formatted, at a
low level, on that controller.
  There is usually a way to get to a configuration routine on the SCSI
controller, early in the boot process.  At that point you can usually
operate on a list of attached SCSI devices, including designating the boot
device and doing a low-level format of read/write devices such as hard
drives.

  No partition information should be able to survive this process.

David Gillett

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