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Old 09-11-07, 08:02
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yelvertoft yelvertoft is offline  
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: North Essex, UK
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Originally Posted by Saphire View Post
Any idea's on how to low level format a drive that has been a slave for the last couple of years. I have been trying for the last 4 hours to make the drive a master.
Christine,
Have you checked the jumper links on the drive itself? If the jumpers have been set as "slave" then they will need swapping to either "auto" or "master" before you can use it as a master drive. As for low level formatting, the program I've used for years is a utility called bcwipepd. Make a bootable floppy (if you have a drive in the machine in question, a rarity these days I agree) or a bootable CD then copy the original v1 DOS based version of bcwipepd.exe onto it. Boot from this disk/CD and run the program. It will make your drive appear as though it was fresh out of the factory. It can then be formatted as normal. I've not used the v2 of the utility yet.

More information here:
http://www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipepd.htm

Duncan
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