Hi, you think that FORMAT C: /U on a 40 GB partition would hang? No, but you selected /U which means wiping the entire 40 GB and doing a surface scan for it! This can take very long, and FORMAT is not optimized for that. I recommend that you use FORMAT C: /Q /U instead, which only writes the filesystem metadate but does not wipe and scan the whole 40 GB. Should be much faster.
In addition, you can use e.g. mkdosfs of Linux to format the drive. Mkdosfs (of dosfstools, current version is 2.10) never does a surface scan as far as I remember, it only initializes the metadata. So it is very fast, too. FreeDOS FORMAT asks the kernel for a recommended cluster size. This cluster size will be 0.5k for small disks (up to 0.5 GB), 4k for normal sized disks, and will be multiplied by 2, 4, 8... for huge disks if necessary to keep each FAT table below a size limit of 16 MB. This is needed because older Windows versions (95b, 98, NT) were not able to process bigger FATs - or at least their disk tools like DEFRAG were not. Not sure about Windows 2000, but at least Windows XP and ME can process bigger FATs. There is no option to override the kernel-recommended cluster size, because such an override would mean adjusting several filesystem parameters which can introduce additional incompatibilities or bugs. However, you can force 4k ALIGNMENT of the clusters, nice if you plan FAT32 -> NTFS conversion at a later moment. But be warned that FreeDOS does not support NTFS at all, it will not access an NTFS drive letter at all (actually: will assign no drive letter to an NTFS partition at all). Please read the FORMAT /? or even FORMAT /Z:longhelp output for more information. Eric. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by Sleepycat Software Learn developer strategies Cisco, Motorola, Ericsson & Lucent use to deliver higher performing products faster, at low TCO. http://www.sleepycat.com/telcomwpreg.php?From=osdnemail3 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
