DIYbanter - View Single Post

krw

In article ,
says...
krw wrote:
In article ,
lid 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****. It is *only* done at the factory as part of the
manufacturing process. The drive cannot function without the
formatting. That is, the user cannot LLF a modern drive. Speaking
of a drive's LLF is meaningless.

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. There is no "unformatted size".

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. ;-)

(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

No it isnt.

(three-bit op-code fields),

That doesnt make it an octal machine.

Sure it does Ron, as much as it is a binary machine. Of course
you're only in this for the argument, as usual, so I'll let you have
it your way.

even some documentation and panel markings were in hexadecimal.
It's just as correct to call binary the figment of the imagination.

Nope, thats what the hardware does, the others are just
representations of binary that are more convenient for humans.

Nope. I choose to group the hardware in threes. It's then octal.

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.

I'm not the one with Ron syndrome either.

--
Keith