> magnet would make it useless, have no sector flags or anything. Since the
> sector flags are installed at the factory (I think) and a format,
> unconditional or other, uses these flags, doesn't erase them,
Uhm... IIRC, a soft sectored diskette (I've only ever used three hard
sectored disks and they were 8"ers) will ship sans sector marks - except for
the revolution marker on 5.25" disks. Hard sectored ones will have either a
hole in the media every sector or factory-placed sector marks. The first
time a soft sectored diskette is formatted the sector markings are laid down
(the PC BIOS has a call to do this, which is what FORMAT does most of the
time. FORMAT then writes in a filesystem, checks each sector marked bad to
verify the BIOS's report, and then puts any DOS markings (not sure if DOS
still has its own) on the disk).
Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett
(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett, http://www.deltasoft.com)
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