Night Owl 6

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ Night Owl 6 / Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso / 010a / frmtmstr.zip / FM.DOC next >

Wrap

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 51KB | 1,160 lines

FormatMaster 3.10 Copyright 1987/88/89/90 by New-Ware All Rights Reserved (tm) ┌─────────┐ ┌─────┴───┐ │ MEMBER ───│ │ │──────────────── │ ┌──────┴──┐ │ Association of │ │ ├──┘ Shareware └──┤ ■ │ Professionals ──────│ ║ │─────────────────── └────╨────┘ Contents 1 PROLOG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 REGISTRATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 CREDITS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4 VERSION HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 5 REGISTERING FORMATMASTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 6 GETTING UP AND RUNNING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6.1 PROGRAM INTIALIZATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 6.2 FORMATMASTER DRIVE TABLE SETTINGS . . . . . . . 7 6.3 FORMATTING SYSTEM DISKS . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 7 FORMATMASTER OPERATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 7.1 SET DRIVE TABLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 7.2 ENTER DOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 7.3 TRANSFER SYSTEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 7.4 ADD VOLUME LABEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 7.5 CYCLE FORMAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 7.6 DOUBLE CYCLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 7.7 RAPID FORMAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 7.8 VERIFY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 7.9 ONLY VERIFY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 7.10 CHECK DISK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 7.11 800K FORMAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 7.12 REGISTRATION FORM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 7.13 QUIT TO DOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 7.14 FORMAT A DISK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 7.15 DOS FORMAT/VERIFY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 7.16 SIMULTANEOUS DOS FORMAT/VERIFY . . . . . . . . 15 7.17 @ CONFIGURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 7.18 THE ESCAPE KEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 7.19 ERROR HANDLING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 8 TECHNICAL NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 9 MONITOR PROBLEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 10 MOUSE SUPPORT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Index 19 i 1 PROLOG The program author, John J. Newlin, is an active member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP). The ASP wants to make sure that the Shareware principle works for you. If you are unable to resolve a Shareware related problem with an ASP member by contacting the member directly, ASP may be able to help. The ASP Ombudsman can help you resolve a dispute or problem with an ASP member, but does not provide technical support for members' products. Please write to the ASP Ombudsman at P.O. Box 5786, Bellevue, WA 98006 or send a Compuserve message via EASYPLEX to ASP Ombudsman 70007,3536. DISCLAIMER New-Ware hereby disclaims all warranties relating to this product, whether express or implied, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. New- Ware cannot and will not be liable for any special, incidental, consequential, indirect or similar damages due to loss of data or any other reason, even if New-Ware or an authorized New-Ware agent has been advised of the possibility of such damages. In no event shall the liability for any damages ever exceed the price paid for the license to use software, regardless of the form and/or extent of the claim. The user of this program bears all risk as to the quality and performance of the software. LICENSE FormatMaster is a Shareware product. As such, it is made available to the general computing public for evaluation. Users are licensed to operate FormatMaster on their personal computers for the purpose of test and evaluation on a trial basis for a limited trial period. It is not possible to reasonably define any definitive limits of a fair and equitable time period for evaluation, therefore it is left to the user's judgment and sense of fair play as to the time required to make a decision as to its usefulness. If the user decides the program is not of sufficient merit to warrant purchase through registration with New- Ware, the program should be removed from their personal computer. Otherwise, if the program is deemed useful and is in regular use on the user's personal computer system, registration with New-Ware is required. Registered users are those users that elect to pay for FormatMaster and register that payment with New-Ware. By virtue of registration and payment for the program, registered users are granted a license to continue to utilize the program on their personal computer for as long as they choose. This license authorizes the user to use the program on any personal computer system he or she may own so long as the program is operated on only one computer system at a time. - 2 - 2 REGISTRATION FormatMaster is sole property of New-Ware Shareware products. The Shareware version, and ONLY that version, may be freely copied and transferred to individual parties for evaluation purposes. The Shareware version, and ONLY that version, may be posted on Bulletin Board systems (BBS) for electronic access as long as NO FEE is charged for its distribution except for private BBS operations that charge a regular user subscription fee. Computer information services such as Compuserve (CIS), Genie, etc., are authorized to post this product for subscriber access. The Shareware version of FormatMaster may NOT be distributed on diskette by any disk distributor/vendor that charges more than $10.00 for the diskette upon which the program and attendant files are recorded without written consent from New-Ware. FormatMaster is a fully functional Shareware product. Shareware is a computer program distribution/marketing method that permits potential buyers to thoroughly try the program prior to purchase. It is NOT free and it is not in the Public Domain. If, after evaluating the program, you find it to be useful enough to use it on a regular basis, you are expected to pay for it by registering with New-Ware. The registration fee is $25.00 and the registered version, which is NOT distributed as Shareware, will not contain the opening Shareware screen nor the closing messages. You may register FormatMaster in one of three ways: 1) By mail with check or money order to: New-Ware 8050 Camino Kiosco San Diego, CA 92122-1820 2) By telephone with Visa/Mastercard to: New-Ware (619) 455-6225 3) Electronically through the New-Ware BBS: New-Ware Shareware Products BBS Running Wildcat! version 2.10p (619) 450-3257 - Node #1 1200/2400/9600 (HST) 455-5226 - Node #2 1200/2400 The New-Ware Shareware Products BBS operates 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Node #1 is dedicated to registered users only. Nodes #2 is open to all callers. Users registering via the BBS receive access to - 3 - the latest registered version within 1 day after leaving their credit card data. Users who register by mail or phone may also access the registered version by BBS, but you MUST log on and leave a comment to the sysop to the effect that you are a registered user and desire access. The author can also on CIS via PPN 71535,665 (please use EASYPLEX). This Shareware version of FormatMaster may be freely copied and passed on to other individual users for their evaluation. Disk vendors and/or distributors that desire to distribute FormatMaster must adhere to the guidelines presented in VENDOR.DOC. 3 CREDITS Computer software products, whether Shareware or Commercial, just don't happen. It takes skilled, dedicated people to design, code, and test a program. As skilled as I like to think I am, it is not possible for me to offer a non-trivial product that does not contain bugs and design flaws. The only way, then, for a New-Ware program to mature into a polished, useful product is through the invaluable assistance of people who care. Thanks to Tom Kellen for his unflagging loyalty and stubborn refusal to let this programmer off the hook when he knew something is amiss and needed fixing. Thanks to Mike (Dr. FileFinder) Callahan for his vigorous support of Shareware products and authors. Thanks to Edward Mendelson for his good ideas. Thanks to Kurt Diesch, fellow ASP member, for saving me some valuable time by providing some needed information. New-Ware purchases thousands of diskettes at bulk rates from MEI/MicroComputer in Columbus, Ohio. All New-Ware products are distributed on these disks and all of these disks are formatted with FormatMaster with no verification. The nearly zero rate of disk return attests to the quality of the MEI diskettes. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to Sammy Mitchell for his TERRIFIC editor, QEDIT. 4 VERSION HISTORY 2.11 - Added 800K formatting. Solved Zenith 386 incompatibility problem. Added command line drive parameter. Added diskette verification. 2.11 - Fixed bug which prevented DOS path search for FM.EXE. Added 400K formatting for single capacity (360K) 5 1/4" drives. Added capability to read boot sector from either drive A or drive B. 2.12 - Added 800K formatting to 3 1/2" 720K diskettes. Added Quick Format option when the target disk has data. Added auto-detection of drive type at - 4 - runtime. 2.13 - Fixed mouse driver bug. Fixed 800K format bug (some machines only). Fixed bug that prevented saving drive table to disk. 2.14 - Changed logic and code to achieve wider disk BIOS compatibility. Return to Main Menu after saving drive table data added. Added ability to terminate verification by pressing any key. Added BIOS compatibility message display during format/verify. 2.15 - Added the DOS environment variable FMSEC=9 for those systems that will not recognize the 10th sector with 800K formatting. 2.16 - Added extra workaround solution for 800K formatting problems. See the file FM800K.DOC 2.17 - Added the capability to turn off "snow" checking for color monitors that don't need it. Fixed bug that affected single capacity drive B in AT machines with a dual capacity drive as drive A. 2.16 - Increased range of machine BIOS compatibility. 2.17 - Increased range of machine BIOS compatibility. 2.18 - Fixed minor bug in verification routine. Reformatted the documentation file. 2.19 - Speeded up the disk verification process. Added the capability to sequentially serialize newly formatted diskettes. 2.20 - Bug fixes. 2.21 - Bug fixes. 2.22 - Removed requirement to initialize boot sector data. 2.23 - Removed requirement to specify high or low capacity disk when verifying, quick formatting, or formatting previously formatted disks. 3.00 - Major changes to format screen display. - Added DOS block device control format options. 3.10 - Added a check disk command to the main menu and to the new choice menu. - Added a choice menu for user input during format operations. - Added dynamic display of format/verify progress. - Fixed minor bugs in message display sequence. 5 REGISTERING FORMATMASTER FormatMaster is a Shareware product. It is NOT public domain software. New-Ware urges those who find FormatMaster to be of sufficient utility so as to use it on a regular basis to remit a registration fee of $20.00. Registered users will receive a copy of FormatMaster on disk that has the opening Shareware information screen - 5 - removed. In addition, registered users will have access the Shareware Products BBS for retrieval of all future registered versions of FormatMaster. Selecting the Registration item from the program main menu will result in a pop-up window that will prompt you for all the necessary information and then print the form for mailing. Registering FormatMaster is easy and may be accomplished in one of following ways: (1) Mail a check or money order in the amount of $20.00 payable to New-Ware. California residents PLEASE!! add 7.25% sales tax ($21.45 total). (2) Mail your Visa or Mastercard number, card expiration date, phone number, and signature to New-Ware. (3) Call (619) 455-6225 and leave your Visa or MasterCard number, expiration date, name and address, and phone number. (4) Call the Shareware Products BBS and register on line. The number is (619) 455-5226, N/8/1, 1200/2400 baud. Your credit card can usually be validated within one day and this is the quickest way to get a copy of the registered version. FormatMaster will be shipped first class mail with two days of receipt of a registration. If you are using Visa or Mastercard for payment please ensure that you include the full card number (i.e., 1234 5678 0000 1234), the card expiration date, and your phone number. Visa or Mastercard only, please. No other credit cards can be accepted. If you call the voice number to register, you may get an answering machine. Have your card or the form printed by FormatMaster ready so you can leave your registration information quickly and accurately. 6 GETTING UP AND RUNNING Operation of FormatMaster is relatively simple and straightforward. Almost all operations are accomplished through selection of a menu item, either via the cursor bar and hitting RETURN or by pressing the key of the first letter of a menu item. There are, however, some initialization steps that should be taken before attempting to format any disks. - 6 - 6.1 PROGRAM INTIALIZATION Here are the three things you should do to get the program to a fully functional state: (1) Make sure that the executable file FM.EXE is in the active directory when you run it. (2) Select "Set Drive Table" from the main menu. FM will normally detect and use the correct parameters for the type of drives in your system but if the actual drive information differs, use the drive table menu to make the appropriate changes. (3) Make sure that the DOS utility SYS.COM is in a directory that is listed in your path string if you intend to transfer system files to a newly formatted diskette. See the file PATHINFO.TXT for more information on the DOS PATH command. 6.2 FORMATMASTER DRIVE TABLE SETTINGS FormatMaster normally detects how the floppy disk drives in your system are configured. Specifically, it is important to know the size (3 1/2" or 5 1/4") of each drive and whether or not that drive is high capacity. Because there are so many configuration variants among PCs and ATs (and clones), it may not necessarily be true that floppy drives are sequentially designated from A to D. In fact, there are some systems with add on 3 1/2" drives (and attendant drivers), that are addressed as a letter that is higher than the hard drive letters in the system. For this reason, you may need to use FormatMaster's drive table setup feature to assure proper performance. At runtime FormatMaster will automatically set the drive table according to information derived from the ROM BIOS. In most cases this information will accurately reflect the status of the drives in your system and it will be unnecessary to alter the drive table. There may be some cases, however, where the table is not properly by FormatMaster, particularly in the case of add-on 3 1/2" drives that use a DOS logical drive designator (i.e., B:,C:,D:) that is not in the usual sequence. The first time you run FormatMaster you should check the drive table settings to determine if they match the way your system is configured. If so, you need do nothing more (although it is okay to save the drive table, if you wish). Otherwise, use the menu to set the table properly and be sure to save the table before attempting to format any disks. - 7 - Floppy disk controllers can address at most up to four drives and access the available drives through numeric codes that range from 0 to 3. For example, just about every PC type machine in the world will have a DOS drive A that is accessed by the BIOS as drive 0. Normally, DOS drive B will be accessed as drive 1, and so on. It should be clear by now that there are two ways of addressing system drives. You communicate with DOS about system drives using "logical" drive designators, which are alphabetic letters ranging from "A" to "Z". DOS in turn calls the machine ROM BIOS to perform low level disk operations (read, write, format, etc.) and uses "physical" drive designators that are numbers. FormatMaster uses a user-defined drive table that keeps track of four important items - the DOS logical drive designator, the BIOS physical drive number, the size of the drive, and whether the drive is a normal or high capacity drive. A high capacity drive is one that supports both normal and high density diskettes. For example, the AT comes with a high capacity 5 1/4" drive as DOS drive A. It will format either normal (360KB) or high-density (1.2MB) floppies. Some systems now have high capacity 3 1/2" drives which format either 720KB or 1.4MB diskettes. Configuring FormatMaster's drive table is relatively simple. You select one of the four drives from the menu and then answer the following prompts. You will be prompted for the DOS logical drive letter, the size of disk the drive supports, and whether or not the drive is high capacity. Once you have made the settings appropriate for your system, you can save them permanently to disk. Just make sure that FM.EXE is in the active directory. If in doubt about which logical drive matches which physical drive, you can experiment. Don't worry, FormatMaster will not attempt to format a hard disk. It only calls the floppy disk BIOS and **never** uses the hard disk format designator codes (80h and 81h). Also, when using the DOS block device control function, FM checks to ensure that the device being operated on is removable and not a hard disk. 6.3 FORMATTING SYSTEM DISKS System diskettes differ from data diskettes in that they contain a slightly different boot sector and they must contain the two DOS system files as well as a compatible copy of COMMAND.COM. FormatMaster will transfer system files to a freshly formatted disk, but you must insure that it can access the DOS utility SYS.COM. You do this by insuring that the file SYS.COM is in a directory whose name appears in your DOS path statement. For example, if your DOS files are in a directory named C:\DOS, then the directory path name C:\DOS **must** appear in your path command. Please read the file PATHINFO.TXT for a more detailed explanation of the DOS PATH command feature. FormatMaster invokes SYS.COM to transfer system files to the newly formatted disk. - 8 - 7 FORMATMASTER OPERATION FormatMaster is menu driven and therefore quite easy to use. The main menu contains the following selections: Format a Disk DOS Format/Verify Simultaneous Format/Verify Set Drive Table Enter DOS Transfer System = OFF Add Volume Label = OFF Cycle Format = OFF Double Cycle = OFF Rapid Format = OFF 800K Format = OFF Verify = ON Only Verify = ON Check Disk Registration Form Quit to DOS @ Configure FM.EXE Menu items are selected either by moving the cursor bar to the desired item and pressing return (MOUSE LEFT BUTTON) or by pressing the key corresponding the the highlighted character. Two of the items above are toggles, e.g., they are either on or off and each time you select one, it is toggled to the opposite setting. If "Transfer System = ON" is set, then FormatMaster will invoke SYS.COM to transfer system files to the freshly formatted disk. Make sure that COMMAND.COM is not a hidden file. If "Add Volume Label = ON", then you will be prompted to enter a disk label prior to formatting any disks. All menu items are augmented by a help line that is written between the top two double lines of the screen. 7.1 SET DRIVE TABLE "Set Drive Table" will bring up a menu that allows setting the operating parameters contained in the drive table for each of up to four drives. An additional menu item, "Save To Disk ", is available to permanently save the parameters to the program file. Selecting an item from this menu will result in a series of prompts that ask for logical DOS drive letter, disk drive size, and drive capacity. If desired to load FM.EXE from a directory other than the one in which it resides, it will be necessary to place the following command in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file so that FormatMaster can locate itself before writing the parameters to the disk file: - 9 - set FMLOC=C:\XXXX\... 7.2 ENTER DOS "Enter DOS" provides the means to "shell out" to the DOS level to perform whatever operations desired. Entering the command "EXIT" from the DOS level will return you to the FormatMaster main menu. 7.3 TRANSFER SYSTEM The "Transfer System" toggle will determine whether or not FormatMaster transfers the DOS system files to the newly formatted disk. You must be operating FormatMaster from a boot disk that contains the two system files, i.e., IBMIO.SYS and IBMDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM, and SYS.COM. SYS.COM must be in a directory whose path name is part of your PATH= string. If the system files are not transferred when this toggle is on, double check the location of SYS.COM and that its host directory does indeed appear in your PATH= string. 7.4 ADD VOLUME LABEL "Add Volume Label" provides a means for the entry of a diskette volume label prior to formatting any disks. Selecting this item results in the presentation of a window which will prompt for the desired volume label. Any valid DOS label name may be entered. If the entered label name contains a number as the LAST portion of the name, that number can be used to add sequential serial numbers to each formatted diskette. For example, if the entered name is SER-0001, FormatMaster will use SER-0001 for the first disk, SER-0002 for the second disk, SER-0022 for the 22nd disk, and so on. Any sequence of numeric digits ('0' to '9') may be used, but they must comprise the LAST portion of the label name. SER-0022X would not be used for sequential disk numbering. If an acceptable sequential number is entered, you will be asked if you wish to use the entered label for serializing disks. If the response is Y(es), then disks formatted using the Cycle Format option will be automatically sequentially serialized using the entered digit series as a base. The last serial number used can be saved via the "" menu item. When saving the current configuration to disk, FormatMaster will ask if you wish to save the current serial number. If the response is Y(es), then the current label name and sequence number is saved to disk. The next time FormatMaster is run it will use the next number in the sequence for cyclically formatting and addding the volume label. To turn off the addition of a volume label, simply press ESC or enter an empty string when prompted for the label. Entry of a label name that does not contain a proper sequence of digits at the end of the name will stop the sequential updating of the serial number. - 10 - 7.5 CYCLE FORMAT The "Cycle Format = OFF" option allows you to set FormatMaster to perform repetitive formatting on any ONE of your system floppy drives with just a pause to change disks at the end of each cycle. If the "Add Volume Label" toggle is ON, FormatMaster will automatically add that label to all disks formatted thereafter. The system will be transferred to each disk if the "Transfer System" toggle is ON. 7.6 DOUBLE CYCLE "Double Cycle = OFF", when toggled to on, provides a means to rapidly format disks in TWO of your system floppy drives. Instead of the normal Format Drive submenu, you will be prompted to enter two items for each drive. The first is the DOS drive letter designator. Make sure that this is a drive letter that you have set up in the "Set Drive Table" option. If your drive table setting indicates that the selected drive is a high capacity drive, you will be asked if you are going to be formatting high capacity diskettes in the drive. In this manner, any two drives in your system may be used for the cyclic formatting. After entering the pertinent information, a beep will sound and you will be instructed to ready the selected drives for formatting. As soon as you press any key, the formatting of the two drives will start. You may terminate the formatting cycle by pressing the ESC key at any time. The formatting operation will continue to completion on whichever drive is active at the time the key is pressed and a message will appear that informs you that the formatting will be terminated following the formatting of the current drive. 7.7 RAPID FORMAT "Rapid Format" provides a way to very quickly reformat disks that are already formatted. If you have a batch of formatted disks that you desire to re-initialize, use this option. Instead of formatting the disk track by track, as is necessary in the case of a fresh, unformatted diskette, FormatMaster will skip the track formatting and re-initialize the FAT and directory sectors. The disk will then be just as if you did a full track by track format. If you use this feature in conjunction with "Double Cycle = ON", things tend to go rather rapidly, so there is an approximate 8 second delay to allow time for swapping disks. The "Verify" option may be used in conjunction with this feature. Note that you cannot rapid format an unformatted disk. - 11 - 7.8 VERIFY "Verify = ON" switches the verification feature on and off. If set to "ON", disk verification will be performed using the BIOS CRC verification routine. Every sector on the disk is checked and all bad sectors are marked. FormatMaster will report bad sectors as cluster groups in the Advisory Message box. At the end of the verification, if were any bad sectors found FormatMaster will update the File Allocation Table (FAT) to lock out those sectors. Note that turning verification to ON will slow down the total formatting process. For example, on a 10mhz XT clone DOS required 2 minutes and 10 seconds to format a 720K disk that had no bad sectors. FormatMaster required 1 minute and 57 seconds. On the same machine, DOS took 1 minute and 28 seconds to format a damaged disk that had 100 bad sectors to mark. FormatMaster formatted, verified, and marked the same disk in 1 minute and 1 second. In some cases, FormatMaster may be more stringent than DOS and mark more sectors unusable. That will result in less total disk space available on a damaged disk, but is preferable to the opposite approach. 7.9 ONLY VERIFY "Only Verify = ON" turns on diskette verification but will not format the target disk. This feature is to be used ONLY with formatted disks and is useful in verifying the integrity of a data diskette. THE DISKETTE FAT WILL NOT BE UPDATED following the verification check. If FormatMaster discovers bad sectors on the disk it is strongly advised to attempt to copy all the data from the diskette to a freshly formatted and verified diskette and then reformat and re-verify the diskette. 7.10 CHECK DISK Selection of this item will bring up the drive selection submenu. Upon selection of a drive, FormatMaster will display a window that contains nearly the same information as the DOS CHKDSK utility provides. The Check Disk function is also available from the choice menu that is displayed during format/verify operations. 7.11 800K FORMAT NOTE: THE 800K OPTION DOES NOT WORK ON ALL SYSTEMS. IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS WITH 800K FORMATTING, USE THE DOS ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE FMSEC=9 TO EFFECT 720K FORMATTING INSTEAD. "800K Format" is a toggle that when set to ON, permits the formatting of a normal capacity (360K) diskette to 800K in a high capacity (1.2M) drive. This will only work on the AT style dual - 12 - capacity 1.2M drives. FormatMaster accomplishes this by formatting a standard 360K 5 1/4" diskette with 80 tracks, 10 sectors to a track. This is possible due to the single step capability built into the dual capacity drive and the fact that DOS has no problem dealing with 10 sector tracks. 800K formatting is only available in physical drives 0 and 1 (usually A and B) and may not work on older 1.2M drives that use speed variation. It is possible that this feature may not work on some machines or with some versions of DOS. Note that the 800K toggle is automatically switched to OFF when using the DOS block device control functions to format a disk. Standard capacity (360K) 5 1/4" drive users may use the 800K option to format a 360K drive to 400K. With "800K Format" set to ON, FormatMaster will format a 360K disk to 400K by formatting with 10 sectors per track, 40 tracks. Standard capacity (720K) 3 1/2" drive users may use the 800K option to format a 720K disk to 800K by formatting with 10 sectors per track, 80 tracks. NOTE: THE 800K OPTION MAY NOT OPERATE PROPERLY ON CERTAIN MACHINES AND/OR WITH CERTAIN VERSIONS OF DOS. SEE THE FILE FM800K.DOC FOR DETAILS ON A WORKAROUND SOLUTION AND HOW TO USE FM80.COM. If the 800K option does not work properly on your system, use the DOS SET command to place the DOS environment variable FMSEC=9 in the environment. This is accomplished by placing the statement SET FMSEC=9 in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file and rebooting your system. If FormatMaster finds FMSEC=9 in the DOS environment at runtime, the Main Menu will reflect this by showing "700K Format" instead of "800K Format". In this case, FormatMaster will format the 360K disk with 80 tracks and 9 sectors (instead of 10 sectors), which your system should have no problem with. NOTE: IF USING THE DOUBLE DRIVE CYCLE FEATURE IN CONJUNCTION WITH 800K/720K FORMATTING, BOTH DRIVES MUST BE 5 1/4" DUAL CAPACITY. IF USING THE 400K OPTION WITH DOUBLE CYCLE FORMATTING, BOTH DRIVES MUST BE 5 1/4" DRIVES. If you have the "Transfer System" and/or "Add Volume Label" toggles on, FormatMaster will act accordingly for each drive being formatted. If the "Add Volume Label" toggle is on, you will be prompted to enter the label at the end of formatting the first drive. From then on, the label you enter will be added to each disk formatted. There is NO PAUSE between drives, so be sure to swap a fresh unformatted disk for a formatted one in the drive that is idle while the other is formatting. This method assures the fastest possible disk formatting on a normal PC/AT system. A beep - 13 - will sound as the formatting is completed on one drive and FormatMaster switches to the other. Pressing the ESC key during a dual drive format operation will stop the formatting as soon as the drive that is currently being formatted is complete. 7.12 REGISTRATION FORM "Registration Form" brings up a window that will prompt you for the entry of registration information and then will create a registration form on your printer that can be mailed to New-Ware. 7.13 QUIT TO DOS "Quit To DOS" terminates FormatMaster and returns you to the DOS level. Alt-X will also terminate the program. 7.14 FORMAT A DISK "Format a Disk" is the main routine of the program. This selection brings up a menu containing the system drives as you defined them using "Set Drive Table". Selection of a drive for format will bring up the formatting window. You will be prompted to insert a disk in the designated drive and to press return when ready to format. Note that information pertaining to the current status of the various toggles appears on the help line at the top of the screen. The main menu may be skipped by executing FormatMaster with the drive letter and a colon on the command line as follows: FM a: In this case, the main format routine window will appear and FormatMaster will be ready to format the drive whose letter was placed on the command line. It is suggested that some users might desire to configure different copies of FM.EXE in different ways and then load the desired copy with the drive letter on the command line to speed up operation and to minimize keystrokes. If the disk you have placed in the designated drive is already formatted, it may contain valuable data and FormatMaster will warn you of this condition and give you four options in a pop-up menu. Use Abort to discontinue the formatting operation. The View option will display an abbreviated directory listing of the target drive so that you may decide if you really want to format the disk or not. The Continue option will proceed with formatting. Since the target disk is already formatted, you may desire to save some time by doing a Quick Format. The Quick Format option simply re- initializes the FAT and ROOT DIRECTORY areas of the diskette - 14 - instead of doing a complete track-by-track format. Verification will proceed normally, if that switch is ON. If you proceed, FormatMaster will check the capacity entry in the drive table and if the drive is a high capacity drive and is unformatted, you will be asked whether you desire to format a high capacity diskette. FormatMaster always checks to see if the disk is formatted and if it is, it will report any files and/or directories it finds on the disk and present an options menu. If the disk contains data, FormatMaster will automatically adjust to the proper format mode. After this query, FormatMaster will format the disk, updating a track counter as it formats each track. When the formatting is complete, if the "Transfer System" toggle is ON, the system files will be transferred and if the "Add Volume Label" toggle is on, a window will pop up prompting you to enter the desired label. You will then get an opportunity to format another disk in the same drive, return to the Main Menu, or terminate FormatMaster and return to DOS. If the "Cycle Format" toggle is on, a beep will sound and you will have the option to insert a fresh disk in the operable drive and continue or to stop the formatting. A disk counter is incremented and displayed during cyclic formatting to help you keep track of the number of disks formatted. 7.15 DOS FORMAT/VERIFY If DOS version 3.2 or greater is present, this option permits format and verification of diskettes via the DOS block device control function. The "Format/Verify A Disk" option uses direct disk BIOS functions to accomplish format and verification. Using the DOS format option may prove to be speedier on some systems and it also may provide a means of formatting in those rare cases where FormatMaster's BIOS routines do not operate properly. This function operates exactly the same as the BIOS function in that the formatting and verification processes are distinctly separate. If the DOS version is less than 3.2, this menu item will be disabled. 7.16 SIMULTANEOUS DOS FORMAT/VERIFY This menu item differs from the previous two items in that it uses the DOS block device control function to perform a simultaneous format and verification. This is the same mode of operation that the DOS format utility uses. On fast machines running DOS 3.3 or greater, this will probably be the speediest of the formatting options that include verification. On a 20mhz 386 machine running DOS 3.3, a 5 1/4" 360K disk was formatted and verified with FORMAT.COM from the DOS level in 44 seconds. FormatMaster simultaneously formatted and verified the same disk in 37.5 seconds. FormatMaster formatted the same disk without - 15 - verification in 29.4 seconds. If the DOS version is 3.2 or less, this menu item will be disabled. 7.17 @ CONFIGURE To permanently configure FormatMaster, use the "@ Configure FM.EXE" option. All the current toggle settings will be saved to disk so that each time you execute the program, it will start up with the toggles as set when you invoked this option. In addition, if you have started FormatMaster with an M (or m) on the command line, the monochrome (composite) monitor color settings will also be saved so that it will not be necessary to use the M on the command line. A prompt will appear that permits turning "snow" checking off for those color monitors that don't need it. 7.18 THE ESCAPE KEY The ESC key can be used to exit from just about any menu or operation. It will also abort formatting with an error message. If the two-drive cycle toggle is ON, FormatMaster will terminate the operation after completing the format operation on the current disk. 7.19 ERROR HANDLING All detected errors are reported in the Error Message box and error messages are accompanied by an audible beep. Bad disk clusters detected during verification are reported in the Advisory Message box. 8 TECHNICAL NOTES FormatMaster is written in Turbo Pascal 5.5 and makes generous use of TurboPower Software's excellent Turbo Pro 5.0 package. Formatting is done accomplished via INT 13h ROM BIOS calls based upon parameters in the drive table or via the DOS block device control (IOCTL) function. The BIOS VERIFY does not perform a read/write type of verification and therefore is not needed if one is using decent quality diskettes. Note that the DOS device control function also utilizes the BIOS disk sector verification function. New-Ware has formatted and distributed thousands of inexpensive (22 cent) diskettes that were formatted without verification. The disk return rate to date has been practically nil. The program was developed on an AST Premium/386 equipped with one dual capacity 5 1/4" disk drive, one dual capacity 3 1/2" disk, and a VGA monitor running MSDOS 3.3 and QEMM 5.0. It has been thoroughly tested on the 386, an AST Premium/286, AST Bravo 286, and an XT clone. - 16 - MSDOS 3.2, 3.3, and 4.01 were used on standard 360K/720K and dual capacity 1.2M/1.4M disk drives. 800K formatting should be thoroughly tested on your system before trusting valuable data to 800K disks. A stringent test is to format a diskette to 800K with FormatMaster and then copy 600K to 700K worth of files to the diskette from a hard drive. Then use the DISKCOMP utility to compare the original files on the hard drive with the copies on the 800K diskette. If all files compare okay, you can rest assured that your system can handle the 800K disks with no problem. Please note that another disk 1.2M drive in another machine running a different DOS variant may not be able to read your 800K disks. 9 MONITOR PROBLEMS Many laptop portables and those machines with a "composite" monitor can trick programs like FormatMaster into thinking that there is a fully functional Color Graphics Adaptor (CGA) on board. If you load the program and the cursor bar is not visible or the display looks strange, quit the program using Alt-X and reload it with an "M" (either case) on the command line. Example: FM m This will force FormatMaster to use a set of monochrome attributes that should work fine on LapTops and composite monitors. Using the main menu Config command will save the current color configuration so that using the "m" on the command line will no longer be necessary the next time FormatMaster is loaded. FormatMaster is now configured to detect the presence of the Hercules InColorCard and to set it to a mode that will recognize the CGA/EGA style color text attributes that FormatMaster uses in a color system. 10 MOUSE SUPPORT FormatMaster supports all the popular Mouse systems. The left button is used to enter a carriage return and the right button serves as an ESC key. NOTE: This documentation and all accompanying explanatory information/files is Copyright 1988 by New-Ware. All rights reserved. Documentation prepared on Borland International's Sprint. - 17 - September 10, 1990 Copyright 1988/89/90, all rights reserved. New-Ware 8050 Camino Kiosco San Diego, CA 92122 - 18 - Index 700K Format 13 F 800K Format 12 File Allocation Table 12 FMSEC=9 13 A Format a Disk 14 Abort 14 Add Volume Label 10 G ASP 2 Genie 3 ASP Ombudsman 2 AST 16 H AUTOEXEC.BAT 9 help line 9 Hercules 17 B high capacity drive 8 bad sectors 12 block device control 15 I Borland 17 IBMDOS.SYS 10 IBMIO.SYS 10 C CGA 17 L Check Disk 12 laptop portables 17 COMMAND.COM 8, 10 command line 14 M Compuserve 3 main menu 14 configure FormatMaster 16 monochrome 17 Continue option 14 Mouse 17 Cycle Format 11 MSDOS 16 D N data diskettes 8 New-Ware 3 disk counter 15 DOS PATH command 8 O DOS SET command 13 Only Verify 12 DOS system files 10 Double Cycle 11 P drive designator 7 PATHINFO.TXT 8 drive letter 8 drive table 7, 9 Q Quit To DOS 14 E Enter DOS 10 R ESC key 16 Rapid Format 11 register 2 - 19 - Registration 6 T Registration Form 14 Transfer System 10 Turbo Pascal 16 S TurboPower Software 16 Shareware 2 Shareware Products BBS 3 V Sprint 17 Verify 12 SYS.COM 8, 10 - 20 -