Re: disk-destroyer.c

From: Vojtech Pavlik (vojtech@suse.cz)
Date: Mon Jul 24 2000 - 05:22:30 EST


On Mon, Jul 24, 2000 at 10:02:09AM +0100, James Sutherland wrote:

> Let's rephrase that a little more accurately, shall we? "Andre knows
> perfectly well that MOST disks out there will have their warranty
> invalidated by running software which allows unrestricted access to the
> RESERVED vendor-specific functions in the ATA spec."

Not true. The warranty will be invalidated only after these
vendor-specific commands are USED. Otherwise you'd get your warranty
void just by running the drive under DOS/W9x, because they offer no
protection at all.

These commands are firmware update, lowlevel format, get/set sector
remapping and this stuff, and they're *very* useful - actually I revived
a bunch of WD drives this way ... they were already too old for a WD
serviceman to do this for free.

> Even MS protects their customers from this sort of damage. Failure to do
> so is fscking stupid, dangerous, and likely to end up with dead penguins
> lining the road. It's even possible that just running Linux on an IDE HDD
> will void your warranty ATM - do you REALLY want that??

Not possible, really.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs

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