From: almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch (Werner Almesberger) Subject: Re: Device names (was Re: ttys2 not responding) Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1992 22:54:17 GMT
In article <1992Jul13.150926.8454@random.ccs.northeastern.edu> mirons@ccs.northeastern.edu (Michael A. Irons) writes:
> The only real problem I see is that of formatting diskettes. This
> should be able to be solved with a patch to format. Right now it cant get
> the params from the floppy 'cause it's not formatted. Try selectivly
> formatting to find out the type & the format the whole thing. ex 360 DDDS
> don't have 15 sectors 1.2M DDHD do.
Selective formatting is difficult. About the only thing you can do is to
format the entire disk and see, whether the number of errors you get is
acceptably low. A DDDS (360kB) can store impressive amounts of data if
you try to format it as a HDDS and it's non-deterministic, where you get
the errors.
If you don't like the fixed format devices, you can write a little shell
script, that invokes setfdprm:
format:
#!/bin/sh
setfdprm $1 $2
fdformat $1
Now you can use it this way: format /dev/fd0 360/360
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ETH Zuerich, CH almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch / / IFW A44 Tel. +41 1 254 7213 almesberger@rzvax.ethz.ch / /_BITNET:_ALMESBER@CZHETH5A__HEPNET/CHADNET:_[20579::]57414::ALMESBERGER_/