*BSD News Article 5710


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!news
From: brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (Brett McCoy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: How to format UNIX floppies under 386BSD
Date: 28 Sep 1992 13:07:24 -0500
Organization: Kansas State University
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <1a7hksINNhfe@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu>
References: <1992Sep24.142441.17045@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au> <1992Sep24.113641.36338@news.th-darmstadt.de> <19usrhINN222@disaster.Germany.EU.net> <rcskb.717489070@minyos.xx.rmit.OZ.AU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: maverick.ksu.ksu.edu

In <rcskb.717489070@minyos.xx.rmit.OZ.AU> rcskb@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au (Kendall Bennett) writes:

>BTW, if I finally get mtools working on 386BSD, it has an mformat command
>to format an MSDOS floppy right? So you could write a shell script that
>would use mformat to low-level format the floppy, then newfs to put a
>file system on it. Or is mformat only a high level format program (like
>the MSDOS 5.0 format without /U?)...

All mformat does is write the MS-DOS filesystem (ha ha) info to track 0.
Stuff like the FAT and the root directory for the disk.  It does not low
level format the disk.  BTW, this is a really quick way to reformat a disk
for MS-DOS that's been used for a tar file or some such.  MS-DOS always
want's to reformat the entire disk in these cases.  mformat will do the
job in about 5-10 seconds.

++Brett;