On 02/12/2001 at 21:38 Christian Biesinger wrote: >DeMoN LaG wrote: > >> You can technically format a drive to about 80% and then cancel it and >> not have a problem, as the drive's FAT is not written until the end, at >> which point data is unrecoverable. > >Data is not necessarily unrecoverable. >Firstly, only the FAT is overwritten, so the actual data is still on disk. >Secondly, there was an unformat command in MS-DOS. Unless you used >"format /u", you could undo the formatting.
The actual operation of the FORMAT command is/was up to the OEM shipping the OS, whilst most OEMs just shipped the standard FORMAT any OEM could and some did modify its behaviour. Original releases of MS-DOS didn't even have a concept of hard disks as such, other than they didn't have the removeable bit set. Other than that the Unix like extensions to MS-DOS came out with version 2, redirectable I/O with < and >, |, subdirectory paths (you could switch, still can I think, the path symbol from '\' to '/' by using the switch option in config.sys). Microsoft had a posix set of tools tr,srt etc, etc from that time on, they were never really distributed though. Simon > >-- >Greetings to Echelon and the NSA: >president usa attack world trade center afghanistan terrorist terrorism >bioterrorism anthrax white house pentagon car bomb
