On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 23:15:58 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:57:51 -0500, wrote:



The C: drive is harder to restore because of the way
Windoze installs software. You really need a cloned drive.
This allows you to restore to a new drive quickly - but if the
microcode on a drive goes bad, it is going to be pretty difficult to
get the clone back onto the dead drive. There are likely programs
available similar to the old "low level format" used on MFM and RLL
drives - but they will be VERY specific - kinda like the low level
format was specific to both drive and controller back in the early
days.


Has anyone actually seen a drive with a virus clobbered firmware?
I think if I see a corrupted drive I am thinking deer, not unicorn.
I've seen drives fail from bad microcode - but there was no virus
involved - and the drives were not field recoverable. The MPG series
Fujitsu comes to mind. The earlier Japanese Fujitsu drives were
bulletproof. They started building the MPG series in Thailand and the
failure rate within warrantee went up to aproxemately 75%, and one
year out of warranty closer to 90%. It put Fujitsu out of the desktop
computer hard drive business in a rather spectacular fashion.