ked@garnet.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (05/02/89)
The fdformat posted recently is very useful, especially because it allows making 720 floppies in 1.2 meg drives, a good way to save money while staying within the rated capabilities of the disks. There is one glich. After using fdformat in any mode, pdtar (my version of tar of MSDOS) will no longer work in raw mode. Calls to biosdisk (Turbo C) return with an error that indicates "address mark not found." This error appears with any disk (from Xenix, from DOS format, from fdformat) once fdformat has been used. A reboot will clear the problem. If run DOS format after using fdformat (any disk, any format), pdtar functions normally. This suggests that fdformat is leaving something in an altered state and that DOS format is performing some sort of reset. Any ideas? Earl H. Kinmonth History Department University of California, Davis 916-752-1636 (voice, fax [2300-0800 PDT]) 916-752-0776 secretary ucbvax!ucdavis!ucdked!cck