On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 22:23:02 -0400, krw wrote:
In article ,
says...
On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:52:51 -0400, krw wrote:
[snip]
I'm quite familiar with the concept. You, OTOH, haven't heard that
LLF went out with button hooks. It's been at least 20 years since
users were capable of doing a LLF. The hardware ain't there.
Low-level format is a necessity. If your drive wasn't low-level
formatted (which must be done at the factory), it would be unusable.
Bull****.
Apparently some really unusual definition of "bull****".
It is *only* done at the factory as part of the
manufacturing process. The drive cannot function without the
formatting.
You admit it's essential...
That is, the user cannot LLF a modern drive.
As I said.
Speaking
of a drive's LLF is meaningless.
Read your own writing...
HIGH level formatting is what your computer does. That's writing the
OS to the sectors created by LLF.
The LLF is done by specialized hardware. LLF is really a meaningless
concept on modern drives.
Also strange. Something can't be both meaningless and essential.
There is no "unformatted size".
Sure there is. Consider the density of stored information within a
sector, and apply that information to the entire surface(s).
To confuse matters, people are CALLING something they can do a LLF,
when it just writes 0 bytes to existing sectors. It's not a LLF at
all.
Nope.
It's writing '0's to the disk. ;-)
Exactly what I said. Try reading before you try to disagree.
(which really is
irrelevant to the disk size issue, they simply use a different definition of
a megabyte, manufacturers define it at 1,000,000 bytes,
Which is what I said.
while the os works
only in numbers divisible by 8, starting at the kilobyte)
Divisible by 8? Not many PCs use octal.
None do. They use binary. Other bases (octal, decimal, hexadecimal,
etc...) do not exist within the computer, but are just ideas present
in the users' minds.
Of course, sorta. The PDP-11 was an octal machine (three-bit op-code
fields),
Which DOES NOT make it octal. It's just 3-bit binary (just like 394 is
a 3-digit decimal numeral, not base 1000). Octal is a HUMAN
representation of what's going on. Nothing to do with the computer
itself.
even some documentation and panel markings were in
hexadecimal.
Actually those are alphanumeric characters. Hex is your
interpretation. Anyway, they're for people to read. Nothing to do
with what the computer is doing.
It's just as correct to call binary the figment of the
imagination.
Wrong. Binary has a 1:1 correspondence with the computer's internal
data processing. No other base does.
Maybe the number you're looking for is 1,048,576 which is 2^20.
I'm not the one with the elementary arithmetic problem.
--
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