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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!wupost!usc!nic.csu.net!vax.sonoma.edu!levinson Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: How to format UNIX floppies under 386BSD Message-ID: <1992Sep29.165042.1@vax.sonoma.edu> From: levinson@vax.sonoma.edu Date: 29 Sep 92 16:50:42 -0800 References: <1992Sep24.142441.17045@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au> <1a7hksINNhfe@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> Organization: Sonoma State University Nntp-Posting-Host: vax.sonoma.edu Lines: 25 In article <1a7hksINNhfe@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu>, brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (Brett McCoy) writes: > 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; -- well, there is format /q in MSDOS which just overwrites the root directory. -- Eric Levinson rcisnet2!root@moon.nbn.com | Home computer (UUCP) levinson@vax.sonoma.edu | Vax I can also be reached on my BBS system, Color Galaxy Milky Way (415) 883-0696