DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / fdutils / xdfformat.1.en
xdfcopy(1) General Commands Manual xdfcopy(1)

xdfcopy - copy and format XDF disks in Linux

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xdfcopy [-format-id] [-d] [-n] [-h head-skew] [-t cylinder-skew] [-T
end-cylinder] [source] target

Xdfcopy is a utility to copy and format XDF disks. XDF (eXtended Density Format) is a format used by OS/2 which can hold 1840KB of data (on a 3 1/2 high density disk). Its advantage over 2m formats is that it is faster: 38KB/s. Because of this fast speed, I extended the XDF standard to higher capacities (1992KB) with a transfer rate of 45KB/s. I called the new formats XXDF.

This program works best with kernels newer than 2.0.0.

If both source and target are given, xdfcopy copies the disk image from file to floppy disk or vice-versa. When copying to a floppy disk, the disk is first formatted, unless the -n option is given.

If no source is given, the target is only formatted. In this case, the target must be a floppy drive.

Formats are selected by the format_id. The following formats are understood:

0 
Formats a 5 1/4 XDF disk (1520 KB, 45.6 KB/s).
1 
Formats a 3 1/2 high density XDF disk (1840 KB, 38.3 KB/s).
2 
Formats a 3 1/2 extra density XDF disk (3680 KB, 102 KB/s)
3 
Formats a 3 1/2 high density XXDF disk (1920 KB, 45 KB/s)
4 
Formats a 3 1/2 extra density XXDF disk (3840 KB, 90 KB/s)

Describes the DOS drive letter for mformat. If this option is given, an MS-DOS filesystem is automatically installed on the disk after the low-level format is complete. In order for this to work, the drive has to be configured to accept the 23x2x80 geometry in your /etc/mtools or your ~/.mtoolsrc file. Moreover, this only works with a version of mtools that is more recent than 3.0.
Example of a working mtoolsrc line: 



A /dev/fd0  0  0 0  0

Examples of a non-working mtoolsrc line: 



A /dev/fd0 12 80 2 18

Don't format the disk before copying the disk image to the disk.

Options for power users

Uses a different track skew than the default (14). For more details on skews, see section superformat. In this version of xdfcopy, the -t parameter is ignored.
Uses a different head skew than the default (0) In this version, this parameter is ignored
Debugging. For each read or write operation, the time it took to complete the operation is printed (in milliseconds). This can be used to optimize the skews.
Tells how many cylinders to format. With the XXDF formats, it is actually possible to format up to 83 cylinders, yielding a format of up to 1992KB on a 3 1/2 high density disk.

Fdutils' texinfo doc

27Jan21 fdutils-5.6