Hi!
i cannot seem to format blank unformatted floppies it fails to verfiy the disk after formatting the 1st 7 sectors even though the disk will format on other format programs anyone have an idea how and why this happens? i may of found a use case that was not captured
Which version of FORMAT do you use, which command line options? What hardware type of floppy drive do you use? Which hardware and BIOS version of mainboard? Which size do you format those floppies to? Is USB involved, or other sizes than 1440k disks and 1440k format? If yes, which? Have you tried using verbose debug messages and copying the messages to a log file to report? Which DOS version do you use? Any specific drivers loaded? For example, floppy.c of FORMAT 0.91u has code which gives up formatting a floppy if one of the first 7 sectors is bad, as those are needed for too important metadata of the filesystem. Interestingly, older versions of FORMAT may have supported a command line option to disable "verify", which may have been useful for USB floppy drives, but I would expect those to be unable to low-level format disks in general in some cases. Also, this FORMAT version does not use the BIOS verify call for floppies - it has switched to just test-reading sectors. It will first read up to 18 sectors per track and if an error is detected, it will read one sector after another for testing. So the next question would be "how unformatted" your disks are. Never formatted? Magnetically damaged? Or just not having any filesystem on them yet, but already with a sector structure? Another thought: When formatting 720k disks, sectors per track would be 9 instead of 18 for 1440k disks, although overformats with 10 sectors per track may still work. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
