"LET'S DO IT" TUTORIALS
Formatting and Preparing Disks
This may seem like a trivial tutorial, but there are several things you can do to
customize a newly formatted disk to suit your needs.
First, insert the disk to be formatted. An icon will appear telling you either the
old disk name if it has been formatted before, or question marks if it was formatted for
some other computer or not formatted at all. Click it once and select FORMAT DISK from the
ICONS pull down menu. If you format it from the Workbench this way, you will not be given
any custom options to set. In order to have some control over the formatting, select the
FORMAT utility on your Workbench disk or partition. Select the drive to format. You will
then be presented with a requester asking you some pertinent information like the disk name,
whether you want a quick format, international mode, fast file system, and if you want a
Trashcan icon attached.
International mode is something you will likely never need so leave that unselected.
If you are using 2.0+ of AmigaDOS, you may format floppies in the FAST FILE SYSTEM which makes
your floppies faster and hold slightly more data. Make sure that you do not intend to use
this disk on a 1.3- version of the OS because it will not be able to read it. If you are not
sure, do not select FFS. We already know that the Trashcan is worthless, so do not select
that. If your disk has been formatted on your Amiga before and you KNOW that it is standard
with NO errors you may select the quick format option. This does not erase the entire
contents of the disk, just the bootblock and the directory track (track 40) where the names
of the files are stored. This makes formatting very quick since it only has to format two
tracks instead of 80. But, any errors or bad tracks on the disk will not be discovered this
way. Also, disks that are non-standard DOS cannot be formatted quick. You can determine a
non-standard DOS disk by the disk name when inserted and read from the Workbench. The name
will read DF0:NDOS for example, depending on which drive you insert it in.
Now that you have all your options set, go ahead and begin the format. If you do not
do a quick format, this can take a couple minutes. Any errors that occur will abort the format
process. Should this occur, you have a couple of options. You can discard the diskette as it
is probably bad. You may also elect to use a program to 'tag' the bad blocks out of
commission. This will allow you to use the disk to hold information, just not use the bad
blocks. Obviously, this will effect the amount of space your disk can hold. It is a personal
thing, but the right answer is to discard it. Chances are good that more bad blocks will
develop quickly as you use it, since the media itself inside the disk is likely defective.
Now that you have a nice clean disk, you may want to tailor it up a little. First
thing you might want to do is make the diskette bootable. To do that we need to issue one
command from the SHELL or use EXECUTE COMMAND from the Workbench:
INSTALL DF0:
This command will INSTALL a bootblock on the disk's bootblock (track 0) track. Now,
when you reboot your system, this disk will 'boot' up over your hard drive or any other
devices. This bootblock contains information the OS need to know to start up the system
using that disk.
Should you try and boot from this disk now, you would be dumped right to a SHELL
prompt as soon as the disk booted. Since there is no 'C' directory, LIBS directory, DEVS
directory, etc. there is really nothing you can do from this prompt.
We have discussed the file called STARTUP-SEQUENCE before (located in your 'S'
directory) now it is time to apply it. If you have booted your system off this new disk,
reboot using your Workbench disk or partition. We will need the utilities there to do this
tutorial. Once booted, enter a SHELL. Insert your new diskette into DF0. Now make a new
directory on the diskette called S.
MAKEDIR DF0:S
This will make a new directory for the STARTUP-SEQUENCE file. We will also need a C
directory to hold some commands for us to use.
MAKEDIR DF0:C
Now let's copy over the commands that we need:
COPY C:TYPE DF0:C/ COPY C:LOADWB DF0:C/ COPY C:ECHO DF0:C/ COPY
C:AVAIL DF0:C/
This will copy over the necessary four commands we are going to use to make your disk.
All of these commands are 'stand alone' i.e. they do not require any libraries or devices to
work. Notice how we copied files from the 'C' directory using C: as the device name? That
only works with a few directories such as 'C', 'S', 'LIBS', and 'DEVS'. Basically, the
system directories used by AmigaDOS.
Now that we have at least a FEW commands to work with, let's make the disk do
something. From the SHELL we are going to make a STARTUP-SEQUENCE file in the 'S' directory
of our new disk:
ED DF0:S/STARTUP-SEQUENCE
In a moment, ED will load and be ready for you to input text. ED is like a miniature
word processor. If you are running V1.3- of the OS, ED is not very friendly. Consult your
user's manual for more information on its commands.
Take a moment to look through the pull down menus. You will find that most Amiga
programs that use pull downs keep common things in the same basic location. For example,
most programs have the load and save options in the menu on the far left.
As we said before, the STARTUP-SEQUENCE is a script file. Basically, it is a text
file with a list of individual commands. Let's enter the commands now into ED.
ECHO "HERE IS WHAT YOUR SYSTEM HAS AVAILABLE:" AVAIL TYPE
S:WELCOME.TXT LOADWB
Now, select to SAVE the document using the pull down menus. Your drive light will
come on and in a moment, the file will be saved. Now we have a workable disk with one
exception. Do you know what it is?
Hint: Look in the text we entered for the STARTUP-SEQUENCE.
That's right. The command TYPE (which displays a text file) is looking for a file
called WELCOME.TXT to display during the startup. Let's rectify that problem. Exit ED by
using the appropriate pull down menu. Now, re-enter ED:
ED DF0:WELCOME.TXT
Once again, you will find yourself in ED with an empty screen. Enter some little
message like:
NOW LOADING WORKBENCH...PLEASE WAIT
Save it as you did before. NOW your disk is ready for the test. Go ahead and boot it
up and revel in the magic you just created!
Now that you are at a Workbench (and saw how fast it booted), you may wonder why it
takes so long for your own Workbench to start up. A good question which is easily explained.
In fact, you know yourself how to do it and already possess the knowledge to do it. How?
Look at your Workbench disk's STARTUP-SEQUENCE file and see what IT does for a startup and you
will understand why it takes so long. Use the TYPE command or even better, a new command
called MORE.
MORE S:STARTUP-SEQUENCE
This will load up a 'text reader' which is slightly bigger than TYPE, but also gives
you more options like pausing at each page, searching for text, etc.
In the next part (Next issue of the CRYPT) we will discuss customizing features like
the pointer, icons, colors, and much much more.
Happy Computing :)
Ian C Fyvie (Dual Editor THe CRYPT)
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