superformat(1) | General Commands Manual | superformat(1) |
superformat - format floppies
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superformat [-D dos-drive] [-v verbosity-level] [-b begin-track] [-e end-track] [--superverify] [--dosverify] [--noverify] [--verify_later] [--zero-based] [-G format-gap] [-F final-gap] [-i interleave] [-c chunksize] [-g gap] [--absolute-skew absolute-skew] [--head-skew head-skew] [--track-skew track-skew] [--biggest-last] drive [media-description]
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 one 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.
Many options have a long and a short form.
Usually, superformat uses sensible default values for these options, which you normally don't need to override. They are intended for expert users. Most of them should only be needed in cases where the hardware or superformat itself has bugs.
In order to maximize the user data transfer rate, the sectors are arranged in such a way that sector 1 of the new track/head comes under the head at the very moment when the drive is ready to read from that track, after having read the previous track. Thus the first sector of the second track is not necessarily near the first sector of the first track. The skew value describes for each track how far sector number 1 is away from the index mark. This skew value changes for each head and track. The amount of this change depends on how fast the disk spins, and on how much time is needed to change the head or the track.
Example: (absolute skew=3, head skew=1, track skew=2)
track 0 head 0: 4,5,6,1,2,3 (skew=3) track 0 head 1: 3,4,5,6,1,2 (skew=4) track 1 head 0: 1,2,3,4,5,6 (skew=0) track 1 head 1: 6,1,2,3,4,5 (skew=1) track 2 head 0: 4,5,6,1,2,3 (skew=3) track 2 head 1: 3,4,5,6,1,2 (skew=4)
N.B. For simplicity's sake, this example expresses skews in units of sectors. In reality, superformat expects the skews to be expressed in raw bytes.
Please see the Media description section in the full fdutils
documentation:
In all the examples of this section, we assume that drive 0 is a 3 1/2 and drive 1 a 5 1/4.
The following example shows how to format a 1440K disk in drive 0:
superformat /dev/fd0 hd
The following example shows how to format a 1200K disk in drive 1:
superformat /dev/fd1 hd
The following example shows how to format a 1440K disk in drive 1:
superformat /dev/fd1 hd sect=18
The following example shows how to format a 720K disk in drive 0:
superformat /dev/fd0 dd
The following example shows how to format a 1743K disk in drive 0 (83 cylinders times 21 sectors):
superformat /dev/fd0 sect=21 cyl=83
The following example shows how to format a 1992K disk in drive 0 (83 cylinders times 2 heads times 12 KB per track)
superformat /dev/fd0 tracksize=12KB cyl=83 mss
The following example shows how to format a 1840K disk in drive 0. It will have 5 2048-byte sectors, one 1024-byte sector, and one 512-byte sector per track:
superformat /dev/fd0 tracksize=23b mss 2m ssize=2KB
All these formats can be autodetected by mtools, using the floppy driver's default settings.
Opening up new window while superformat is running produces overrun errors. These errors are benign, as the failed operation is automatically retried until it succeeds.
Fdutils' texinfo doc
03Mar05 | fdutils-5.5 |