On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 11:24:59 +0900, Kali Mclaughlin wrote: > Dear List: > I am completely confused about formatting and fdisking. There is a "low > level format" thing as well that my Pentium wont do, but the good old > 386 will. > I am told that to clean up a HDD you run fdisk, and then format.com with > switches for HDD rather than floppy. It seems to be different with DRDOS > which I use normally. Its fdisk seems to do the formatting.
DrDos Fdisk does not 'format' the partition. Rather, it simply 'verifies' the clusters which have just been assigned to the newly created partition. AFAIK, Most (if not all), versions of Fdisk do this. Even Linux Fdisk does not format the partition. Format is still needed to make sure that the partition is 'clean' and ready to use. > Andy in a previous posting said that if there is no need for partitions > then fdisk is not needed. Fdisk is still needed even if you intend to use the entire HDD as one huge partition. You simply create a 'Primary partition' which uses the entire drive. But Dos will not be able to see partitions of greater than 2gig > The issue arises because I am still in the dark about why half my HDDs > refuse to load UMSDOS system for Monkeylinux. It seems unrelated to what > DOS is being booted, but to what DOS "made" the disk. SYS.COM does not > seem to alter the acceptability of the disk to Monkey. Sorry... I know nothing about MonkeyLinux. > Perhaps DRDOS fdisk is messing up my HDDs? Not very likely. I use no other Fdisk but OpenDos v7.01 And I have *never* had so-much-as a single bad cluster.... *ever* :)))) -- Glenn http://arachne.cz/ http://www.delorie.com/listserv/mime/ http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/ http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/aqc/
