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PGP Signed Message
|
1997-01-17
|
3KB
|
84 lines
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
HOW TO FORMAT A DMF-FORMAT DISK
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Microsoft has begun using an oddball 21-sector format on its
program distribution 3 1/2" floppy disks which they call
High-Density DMF. (Examples are Microsoft Word 6.0c and
Microsoft Excel 5.0c) These DMF-format floppies cannot be
copied or duplicated with any conventional DOS commands; all
you can do is install from them - if the floppies are
trouble-free!
I like to have backup copies of all my original program disks.
I think it's just a wise thing to do. Floppies can go bad
and it's good to have a backup set of original program disks
if they are ever needed. So, the new DMF-format floppies
presented a real challenge in order to make a backup set
of disks.
A nifty little public-domain program, FDFORMAT, lets users
manage DMF-format floppies with ease. Though FDFORMAT and its
associated FDREAD tsr are in the public domain, and no fee is
requested, a thank-you to Christian Hochstatter, the coder
from Marburg, Germany, who developed it, wouldn't hurt.
DMF-format disks came along after FDFORMAT was written.
Therefore, FDFORMAT does NOT explicitly support formatting
a DMF disk with its supplied /F parameter options. After a
little experimentation, I found the proper command line
parameters to use in order to format a DMF disk.
The command to format a DMF-format 3 1/2" disk is:
FDFORMAT /T:80 /N:21 /C:4 /D:16 /M:240
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This will yield the following results from FDFORMAT after
the disk is formatted:
--------------------------------
OEM-Entry CH-FOR16
Total sectors on disk: 3360
Sectors per track: 21
Heads: 2
Bytes per sector: 512
Hidden sectors: 0
Boot-sectors: 1
Number of FATs: 2
Sectors per FAT: 3
Total clusters on disk: 838
1716224 total bytes on disk
1716224 bytes available
--------------------------------
The key is the /M:240 parameter. This sets the Media Descriptor
Byte to F0 (hex). This allows FDFORMAT to successfully use
4 sectors per cluster on a floppy disk. DOS normally supports
only 1 or 2 sectors per cluster as the FDFORMAT documentation
explains. Without this parameter, and using 4 sectors per cluster
(/C:4), FDFORMAT will incorrectly set the Media Descriptor Byte
to F8 (hex) and the disk will NOT be properly read by DOS.
After formatting your DMF-format floppies, the original program
disk files can be copied to the DMF-format backup floppies.
** Be sure to also use the LABEL command to label each backup disk
with the appropriate label from each original disk! **
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