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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!olivea!pagesat!news.cerf.net!crash!warelock From: warelock@crash.cts.com (Tom Zacharoff) Subject: Format (for netbsd): where is it??? Organization: CTS Network Services (crash, ctsnet), El Cajon, CA Date: 01 Sep 93 18:24:38 PDT Message-ID: <1993Sep01.182438.12330@crash> Lines: 28 I have a netbsd pc at home and have access to a sysv unix box at work. Upon reading in the man pages for the system at work I found a page describing the format command. This made a *lot* of sense to me. To be able to check and fix the disk *before* any software gets installed onto it! Now I realize that bad144 is now working - I was using it myself. You can get by with using just bad144 on a disk that hasn't been cleaned of bad areas before installation. You will however end up pulling out your hair strand by strand constantly having to reboot your machine again and again "putting out the fires" of hard errors that crash your machine!!! I've searched my whole hard disk for it. I've checked all the man pages and found one listed under *vax* software for it. I've seen it on other systems and heard that Linux has something like it. BSD must have had it in it's original form of whatever it was before it was ported to the i386 platform. So where's the beef? I've asked several commercial unix vendors about it and they seemed shocked that my unix didn't come with it. They don't carry *any* software for netbsd anyway so the point is moot. What to do?!? Is there a kind soul out there that has ported the format command to netbsd? If so can you uuencode it and send it to me? Or better yet, let your light shine forth and post it on the net right here? If not, is there anyone who knows details of how and where all this stuff was ported from and how to get a copy of the source for the BSD format command? I'm desperate. I'll learn C if I have to.