aubrey@rpp386.cactus.org (Aubrey McIntosh) (11/18/89)
These are my second round of thoughts for a floppy disk formatting
program. The first was a bootable program, auto-restarted to facilitate
batch formats, duplicated the first few tracks, and with fiddling of
the boot code and seed disk, would produce MS-dos, MINIX, p-System, or
YODOS disks. Nice, but my 3 hour project list that goes forever file
has another project on top.
1) The user knows enough to tell the program what type of floppy he
has. So he can give one of the options -[3742]. i.e.
3 360k 5"
7 720k 3"
4 1.4M 3"
2 1.2M 5"
2) The default option gives 360k.
3) The program verifies tracks after formatting.
4) It doesn't do anything else.
5) mkfs takes over next.
6) Oh, you tell it which drive to format. -D[0123]
I patched one in assembly to change the floppy interleave last week, but
it was derived from Microsoft code, and I can't (wisely) release it.
So what did I miss? This doesn't seem that hard. Is there a whole new
level beyond the few thoughts I named? Are folks thinking to add HD support?
--
Aubrey McIntosh Freelance using Modula-2
Real time, embedded, instruments.
Austin, TX 78723 Enquiries welcome
1-(512)-452-1540 aubrey%rpp386.Cactus.org@cs.utexas.edu