On Saturday September 6 2003 11:39 am, David E. Fox wrote:
> > fdutils, includes among other utilities, superformat. But
> > it's only for formatting DOS file system floppy's. Won't work
> > for an
>
> What would be the difference between a 10 sector per track DOS
> file system floppy and an ext2 fs floppy? I don't mean from a
> file system standpoint, I know the differences, but from a
> hardware standpoint, what is it about ext2 that makes it harder
> to use higher-capacity format disks?
I dunno
>
> Or does superformat simply make a DOS image? You still could
> make a bigger disk with 'fdformat' and go that route, right? It's
> been some time since I really used floppies much, so I'm just not
> understanding this point. I trink 1.6 meg would work but the
> media could not be all that reliable. I do recall the problems
> when I first started using Linux - I used to tell people that
> they had better use known good and reliable disks for the
> boot/root combos as those were native linux and back then if you
> had floppies with bad sectors, you were essentially out of luck.
from the superformat man page,
superformat is used to format disks with a capacity of up to
1992K HD or 3984K ED. See section Extended formats, for a detailed
description of these formats. See section Media description,
for a detailed description of the syntax for the media
description. If no media description is given, superformat
formats a disk in the highest available density for that drive,
using standard parameters (i.e. no extra capacity formats).
When the disk is formatted, superformat automatically
invokes mformat in order to put an MS-DOS filesystem on it.
You may ignore this filesystem, if you don't need it.
Superformat allows to format 2m formats. Be aware, however,
that these 2m formats were specifically designed to hold an MS-DOS
filesystem, and that they take advantage of the fact that the
MS-DOS filesystem uses redundant sectors on the first track (the
FAT, which is represented twice). The second copy of the FAT is
not represented on the disk.
High capacity formats are sensitive to the exact rotation speed of
the drive and the resulting difference in raw capacity. That's why
superformat performs a measurement of the disks raw capacity before
proceeding with the formatting. This measurement is rather time
consuming, and can be avoided by storing the relative
deviation of the drive capacity into the drive definition file
file. See section Drive descriptions, for more details on
this file. The line to be inserted into the drive definition file
is printed by superformat after performing its measurement.
However, this line depends on the drive and the controller. Do not
copy it to other computers. Remove it before installing
another drive or upgrade your floppy controller. Swap the
drive numbers if you swap the drives in your computer.
...................
The man page is different than the last time I fooled with
fdutils. I don't even have a working floppy drive now. Mine died an
I haven't bothered to replace it. When I did use superformat some
time ago, it would only make oversize DOS floppy's by varying
amounts of sectors (21 IIRC) an tracks. I was never able to over
format an ext2 floppy with any utility.
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
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