Hi! > > Hi, you think that FORMAT C: /U on a 40 GB partition would hang? > > No, but you selected /U which means wiping the entire 40 GB and > > doing a surface scan for it! > That's the desired behavior in this case. We're assuming the user has a > hosed disk and needs a complete reformat.
Unless the disk is physically damaged you never need to initialize more than the metadata during format. Would a surface scan / wipe have been of actual use, it would be on by default in mkdosfs... The only problems which you get by suppressing the surface scan are: - data is not wiped, so an UNFORMAT *might* be possible - surface scan is not done, so physical damage will not be detected. If you need a full wipe / format, download the - usually very fast - format and analyze tools from the homepage of your harddisk vendor. But this will wipe all partitions, not only one. Or check the FreeDOS.org links page, it will probably link a few of those tools. > What cluster size would it pick for a 40G, 80G or 120G volume? For 40 GB, it will start at 4k -> would be 10 M clusters -> FAT would be 40 MB in size -> too big -> ... will use 16k cluster size which will mean 10 MB FAT size and is the smallest possible cluster size if you want the FAT to be < 16 MB. For 80 GB, it will be 32k and for 120 GB it will be 32k as well. For bigger disks, you get BIOS problems (128 GB limit), Windows 9x will not support them (128 GB limit), and you get either a cluster size of 64k (not supported by Windows 9x) or a FAT size of > 16 MB (not supported by Windows 9x) or both. And of course it is highly ineffective to format an huge partition of more than 100 GB to FAT32 at all. This filesystem was never meant for that. I think 40 GB will be okay, but for 80 GB things will already be quite slow. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by Sleepycat Software Learn developer strategies Cisco, Motorola, Ericsson & Lucent use to deliver higher performing products faster, at low TCO. http://www.sleepycat.com/telcomwpreg.php?From=osdnemail3 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
