malpass@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Don Malpass) (12/15/87)
In the exercise I just went through with my floppy controller I also observed the following worth sharing: 1. Zenith's FORMAT program ignores the VERIFY environment variable. If you want the disk verified after formatting, you MUST use the /v switch. 2. If you DO use the /v switch, and if the disk does not format properly (as will be the case if YOUR precomp pot is wrong) the verify either tries forever or does so for so long that it SEEMS like forever. And the great news is that it doesn't respond to <CRL>C or anything else I tried to get its attention - you reboot! This is a strong argument for taking the more time consuming step of using the Norton utilities to do the verification if you don't expect a healthy format. Is there a more friendly version of FORMAT for HZ-100's out there? One that wouldn't allow formatting of hard disks without more confirmation would also be nice, although I s'pose I could surround FORMAT.COM with a batch file (earlier in my search path) which checked for drive letters above D. I've yet to format my hard disk accidentally, but every time I use FORMAT I have my heart in my mouth. Don [malpass@LL-vlsi.arpa]