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Software Vault: The Gold Collection
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Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO
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FMT21.DOC
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1993-04-08
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F M T
Version 2.1
Documentation
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 1
Table Of Contents
Disclaimer of warranty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
License . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. How to install and run FMT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Configuration file and command line arguments. . . . . . 6
4. Inside CONFIG.DCF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Command line arguments and examples. . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. How to assign serial numbers and labels. . . . . . . . . 10
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 2
DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY
THIS SOFTWARE AND MANUAL ARE SUPPLIED "AS IS". THE AUTHOR HEREBY
DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES RELATING TO THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS
DOCUMENTATION FILE, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED
TO DAMAGE TO HARDWARE, SOFTWARE AND/OR DATA FROM USE OF THIS
PRODUCT. IN NO EVENT WILL THE AUTHOR OF THIS SOFTWARE BE LIABLE
TO YOU OR ANY OTHER PARTY FOR ANY DAMAGES. YOUR USE OF THIS
SOFTWARE INDICATES THAT YOU HAVE READ AND AGREE TO THESE AND
OTHER TERMS INCLUDED IN THIS DOCUMENTATION FILE.
DUE TO THE NATURE OF EVOLVING PROGRAMMING AND THE VARIOUS
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENTS IN WHICH THIS SOFTWARE MAY
BE USED, IT IS UNDERSTOOD THAT OCCASIONAL "BUGS" OR UNFITNESS
MAY ARISE. THE USER SHOULD ALWAYS TEST THIS SOFTWARE THOROUGHLY
WITH NON-CRITICAL DATA BEFORE RELYING ON IT.
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 3
LICENSE
1. In return for the payment of a one time fee, the customer is
granted a non-commercial or commercial license.
2. If the registration is for a non-commercial license the customer
can use the software for personal backup or other usages in which
the customer make no profit and the duplicated diskettes of any
particular source diskette (or image file) are not distributed to
more than ten persons. In addition, the software may not be used in
any business, organization, institution or government agency.
3. If the registration is for a commercial license the customer can
use the software in a business, organization, institution or
government agency, for profit or non-profit purposes. With a
commercial license the customer can distributed the duplicated
diskettes to as many persons as he or she likes
4. The customer may use the product just-like-a-book which means
this software can be used by more than one person and can be moved
from one computer to another so long as there is NO POSSIBILITY of
it being used by two different persons on two different computers
at the same time, just like a book can not be read by two different
persons in two different places at the same time.
5. This software and its documentation and all supplemental files
are property of the author and may not be duplicated for sale to
any third parties without written permission from the author.
6. The customer agrees that this product is protected by United
States copyright law and international copyright treaty provisions.
Purchase of this license does not transfer any right, title or
interest in the product to the customer except as specifically set
forth in this license agreement.
7. The author of this software product reserves the right to
terminate this license upon breach.
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 4
1. INTRODUCTION:
FMT is a utility to format 360KB, 1.2MB, 720KB and 1.44MB
diskettes. Features include no keyboard operation, serial
number and label assignment and bad sectors handling.
The serial number and label can be assigned incrementally with
a text file which stores the serial number and label for the
next diskette to be formatted. You can keep more than one text
file for this purpose. Before exit, FMT will update the file
automatically.
Conventionally, a cluster is marked as bad cluster if the
formatting program fails to access after three tries. FMT,
however, adopts a more strict policy to ensure that your
valuable data won't be saved on places which are bad or about to
turn bad. FMT will try three times too. The difference is that
if FMT fails to access a sector in the first try it will mark
the sector bad and tell you how many tries has failed.
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 5
2. HOW TO INSTALL AND RUN FMT
Copy the EXE and DOC files to a directory created for DCF and
DUP. Define the PATH in your AUTOEXEC.BAT to include the
directory of FMT.EXE or the directory of a one-line batch file
which contains the path of FMT.EXE.
Type "FMT" followed by the "enter" key to execute the program.
The first time you run the program it will ask for a formatted
diskette so that it can create a FMT.DAT file.
After the FMT.DAT file has been created, you can start
formatting diskettes. You can specify the floppy drive on the
command line.
If you only have one or two floppy drives you can skip the rest
of this section.
In systems with four floppy drives, if a device driver which
came with the controller is installed FMT usually can detect the
drive letters automatically and the drive letters should be used
to specify the third and fourth drives. If no device driver
(TSR) is installed you need to use 3 and 4 as the drive letters
for the third and fourth drives. In this case you need to edit a
text file, CONFIG.DCF, that provides the information on floppy
drive capacity.
The following is an example of the text file in which a 1.2MB,
a 1.44MB and a 360KB drives are specified as the first, the
second and the third drives with drive letters A: B: and G:,
respectively. The 0 on the last line indicates that the fourth
drive is not installed. If all drives are defined, such as in
the example, FMT will not check with DOS for drive capacity.
This can speed up the initialization process.
$DRIVE
1 1200 A:
2 1440 B:
3 360 G:
4 0
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 6
3. CONFIGURATION FILE AND COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS
If you have read the DOC file of DCF you can skip this section
and continue at section 5.
Basically, configuration file is used to stored information
which you don't expect to change often while command line
arguments are used for specifying more dynamic parameters.
For example, it's unlikely that you need to change the drive
capacity often, so these information can only be specified in
the configuration file, not on the command line.
On the other hand, it's unlikely that you use the same source
and target each time, so these can only be specified on the
command line, not in the configuration file.
The only information you can specified both in the configuration
file and command line is the default options. You may have your
own idea how the defaults should be (in configuration file) and
make a slight adjustment (on command line) when necessary. In
other words, command line options override the configuration
file options.
The configuration file is a text file. The default file name is
CONFIG.DCF. If you use the default file name you can simply type
"FMT" at DOS prompt and the program will retrieve information
from the file automatically.
There are cases that you need to use a different name. For
example, you may want to keep two configuration files for
different applications. In this case you need to provide the
file name on the command line. For example, if file ABC is your
configuration file you need to type "FMT @ABC" at DOS prompt.
The usage of the configuration file is explained in the next
section. The usage of command line arguments is fully explained
in section 5.
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 7
4. INSIDE CONFIG.DCF
If you have read the DOC file of DCF you can skip this section
and continue at section 5.
The user can specify up to seven keywords in the configuration
file. Each keyword specify a specific kind of parameters or
information.
$DRIVE : You don't need to provide this information except for
the following two cases. If the program fails to get
the correct drive capacity from your system or if you
want to access four drives without installing the
device driver which came with the controller you can
use this keyword to specify the drive capacity in the
CONFIG.DCF file.
The next few lines contain parameters about diskette
drives in your system. On each line, the first number
specify the drive, 1 for drive A:, 2 for drive B:, 3
and 4 for third and fourth drives in a four drive
system. The second number is the drive capacity in KB.
A drive letter (optional) can be specified at the end.
See section 4 of DCF40F.DOC for details.
$OPTION : The next few lines specify the default options used by
FMT at start up. The format is the same as those on
the command line but without the leading /. See
section 5 for details.
$SYSPATH : The next line specifies the path for system file.
For example, FMT.DAT is considered a system file.
$IMGPATH : Not used by FMT.
$TMPPATH : Not used by FMT.
$NOMSG : Not used by FMT.
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 8
5. COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS AND EXAMPLES
If you have read the DOC file of DCF you only need to learn the
t option.
There are fourteen options you can specify using command line
arguments. You can also specify these options in the CONFIG.DCF
file. The command line options override the CONFIG.DCF options.
In addition, you can also specify an alternative configuration
file and the text file for serial number and label on the command
line. See examples at the end of this section.
Note that the '+' sign after any option can be omitted.
/c followed by +/-. Set Compare ON/OFF. When ON the program
performs read-back and byte-by-byte comparison for every
track formatted on a target diskette. Default is ON.
/m Not used by FMT.
/f Not used by FMT.
/s followed by +/-. Set Sound ON/OFF. When ON the program will
give an audio signal after formatting a diskette or 20
seconds of inactivity. Default is ON.
/q Not used by FMT.
/k Not used by FMT.
/n Not used by FMT.
/d Not used by FMT.
/t followed by +/-. Set target density. In DCF, this option is
used for source density. In FMT, however, it is used for
specifying target density. If + the program creates high
density diskette in a 1.2 or 1.44MB drive. If - it creates
low density diskette instead. No default is assumed.
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 9
/o followed by +/-. Set "mono in color" mode. In a color
system, you can use /o+ to force FMT run in black and white.
Default is -.
/x Not used by FMT.
/b Not used by FMT.
/a Not used by FMT.
/w Not used by FMT.
@file_name specify alternative name for the configuration file.
#file_name specify a text file containing information for
serial number and label assignment.
drive: define a floppy drive for formatting.
EXAMPLES:
FMT /t+c-s- Set defaults of target Density, Compare and Sound
to HIGH, OFF and OFF.
FMT /tc-s- Same as the last example. The '+' can be and is
omitted.
FMT A: Format with drive A:.
FMT 3: Format with the third drive, when device driver
is not installed.
FMT G: Same as the last example, but in this case the
driver is installed and the drive letters is G.
FMT Copyright 1992, 1993 Chang Ping Lee page 10
6. HOW TO ASSIGN SERIAL NUMBERS AND LABELS
You need to create a text file which stores the serial number
and label for the next diskette to be copied. You can also use
more than one file, for example, file F360 for 360KB diskettes,
F720 for 720 KB diskettes, etc.
FMT looks for file VOLUME.FMT automatically, so if you create a
file called VOLUME.FMT for this purpose you don't need to
specify the file name on the command line. Otherwise, you'll
need to use a command line argument. For example, if you type
"FMT #SERIAL" FMT will look for the file SERIAL for serial
number and label information.
The following is an example of the text file.
$SERIAL
2F3D1355
$LABEL
DISK_*****
32
The keyword $SERIAL indicates that serial number will follow on
the next line. Similarly, The keyword $LABEL indicates the label
will follow on the next line. The label can contain a number
which is to be increased on each diskette being formatted. To
imbed a number in the label use *'s to indicate where you want
the number to be and then on the following line specify the
number to be imbedded. FMT only takes one string for label. If
you need spaces use underscores. The above example will produce
a diskette with label "DISK 32", the underscore replaced by
space, the stars replaced by the number. If you quit, say after
formatting five diskette, the file will be updated and the
number 32 will be changed to 37. The serial number will be
updated too.
Note that the serial number is hexadecimal while the number
imbedded in the label is decimal.