fdformat

FDFORMAT - Format Floppy Disks with Higher Capacity

This project is of historic interest only. I worked on it between 1988 and 1991.

It runs under MS-DOS 3.20 or higher and also Windows 95/98/ME.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

IBM or compatible Computer DOS 3.20 or above

FEATURES OF FDFORMAT

FDFORMAT is a replacement for the DOS-Format program, which has the following advantages:

1. Supporting 3½"-1.44 MB drives with any BIOS-Versions in ATs and Clones. This saves you a lot of money, you would need for a new BIOS-Version.
2. Formatting and using of 720/820 kByte disks in AT 5¼"-1.2 MByte Drives using cheap double-density (DD) disks.
3. Increasing the capacity of your disks up to 300 kByte additional storage.
4. Supporting 3½"-360 kByte format. This is useful, when you want to make copies of 5¼"-disks to 3½"-Disks using DISKCOPY
5. Enhance speed of your diskette I/O up to 100% with sector sliding. This is a method of physical ordering sectors in a way, that your drive is ready to read the next logical sector, when your head advances one track.
6. Improved BOOT-Sector, which automatically boots from harddisk, if the diskette in drive A: is not a system disk. This allows you to leave the diskette in drive A:, when you reboot the system.

GETTING STARTED

To make full use of FDFORMAT, you have to make a small TSR resident in memory. There are two different TSRs for XT-computers and AT- computers. 80386/80486 machines are treated as AT computers here. The TSR for AT computers is FDREAD.EXE and for XT computers it is FDR88.EXE. Both TSRs use less than 200 Bytes resident memory.

To make FDREAD (or FDR88) resident simply type FDREAD (or FDR88) from the DOS-Command-Line. Or install it in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. If you have a memory-manager installed, that supports UMB (like QEMM, QRAM, mov'em or 386-Max), do not load FDREAD (or FDR88) high. The TSR automatically detects the memory manager and will load high itself.

FDREAD will also automatically load high on computers with a 286(!!!) processor and up, if DOS 5 or higher is used. You must have HIMEM.SYS (or another XMS-Driver) installed and put DOS=HIGH in your CONFIG.SYS file. Since this technique of high-loading is quite tricky, you must ensure, that FDREAD is loaded before any program that plays with the A20 line and grabs the Interrupt 13 (Hex). This is the case for some disk-caching programs like HYPERDISK(TM). If you are using a disk- caching program, load FDREAD before the caching program. Also, if the system hangs, after you installed FDREAD, load FDREAD as the first TSR.

If you get the error "Too much memory available". You must load FDREAD twice to avoid this error.

The TSR is required to support diskette formats, which are non- standard under DOS. If you intend to use FDFORMAT only with DOS- standard-diskette-formats, you do not need FDREAD (or FDR88).

Note, that it is not possible to create bootable diskettes, which require the TSR. It may also be possible, that a format, which can be read without the TSR on your computer, will fail on another computer. If you are creating bootable diskettes, it is recommended only to use DOS-standard-formats.

USING FDFORMAT

The general Syntax for FDFORMAT is:

             FDFORMAT <drive> [options]

<drive> may be A: or B:. FDFORMAT does not format harddisks. Options begin with a letter or number. Options may be preceeded by '/' or '-'. If you do not preceed options with '/' or '-', you must seperate the options with spaces. '.' and ':' are always ignored. So the following commands will all format a 1.44 MByte Disk in Drive A:

 FDFORMAT A: /F:1.44
 FDFORMAT A: -F144
 FDFORMAT A: F144

You may precede all numbers with a $-sign to indicate, that they are hexadecimal numbers.

OPTIONS USED IN FDFORMAT

The most important option is the F-Option. The F-Option determines the general Format, which is used for the target diskette.

The following table shows, which parameters are allowed for the F- Options and for which type of Disk-Drive:

	F-Opt Format          360k-Drive 720k-Drive 1.2M-Drive 1.44M-Drive
	----- --------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- -----------
	F160  160 kByte Disk  yes        FDREAD     yes        FDREAD
	F180  180 kByte Disk  yes        FDREAD     yes        FDREAD
	F200  200 kByte Disk  FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD
	F205  205 kByte Disk  FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD
	F320  320 kByte Disk  yes        FDREAD     yes        FDREAD
	F360  360 kByte Disk  yes        FDREAD     yes        FDREAD
	F400  400 kByte Disk  FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD
	F410  410 kByte Disk  FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD
	F720  720 kByte Disk  no         yes        FDREAD     yes
	F800  800 kByte Disk  no         FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD
	F820  820 kByte Disk  no         FDREAD     FDREAD     FDREAD
	F120  1.2 MByte Disk  no         no         yes        yes
	F12   1.2 MByte Disk  no         no         yes        yes
	F144  1.44 MByte Disk no         no         FDREAD     yes
	F14   1.44 MByte Disk no         no         FDREAD     yes
	F148  1.48 MByte Disk no         no         FDREAD     yes
	F16   1.6 MByte Disk  no         no         no         FDREAD
	F164  1.64 MByte Disk no         no         no         FDREAD
	F168  1.68 MByte Disk no         no         no         FDREAD
	F172  1.72 MByte Disk no         no         no         FDREAD

FDREAD in the above table means, that this format will work only, if FDREAD (or FDR88) is installed. You may find out, that this table will not be valid for your table and that you can use certain diskette formats without FDREAD (or FDR88), that are listed to work with FDREAD (or FDR88) only.

The other options are:

    1    : Format single sided Disk (provided for DOS-FORMAT
           compatibility).
    4    : Format Standard 360 kByte Disk (provided for DOS-FORMAT
           compatibility).
    8    : Format 8 sector Disk (provided for DOS-FORMAT compatibility).
    A    : Use BIOS-Calls only to switch to different diskette types.
    Bnnn : Use Disk-Type Byte nnn (for use with older BIOS Versions).
    Cnnn : Use nnn Sectors per Cluster (nnn = 1 or 2).
    Dnnn : Use nnn Root-Directory-Entries (nnn = 1-224).
    Gnnn : Use Gap-Length of nnn (for use by experts only).
    Hnnn : Use nnn heads (nnn = 1 or 2).
    Innn : Use an Interleave of nnn (for use by experts only).
    K    : Do not wait for any keyboard input, when starting FDFORMAT.
           (Useful, when starting FDFORMAT from batch files).
    Mnnn : Use Media Byte nnn (Useful for ATARI formats).
    Mnnn : Use Media-Descriptor-Byte nnn. (Useful when formatting ATARI ST
           disks).
    Nnnn : Use nnn Sectors.
    O    : Format 720 kByte disk for use with AT&T/Olivetti M24/M28.
    Q    : Quick Format. Only rewrite the System-Area.
    R    : Do not verify disk (and save 33% time).
    S    : Make System-Disk.
    Snnn : Use nnn Sectors.
    Tnnn : Use nnn Tracks.
    U    : Unconditionally format the diskette.
    V    : Write Label to Disk.
    W    : Format with erase. Physically reformat diskette without data
           loss
    Xnnn : Slide nnn Sectors, when head changes.
    Ynnn : Slide nnn Sectors nnn, when track changes.

Examples:

    FDFORMAT A: /4                                    (format 360 kB disk)
    FDFORMAT A: /F:1.72                              (format 1.72 MB disk)
    FDFORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9                            (format 720 kB disk)
    FDFORMAT A: /O                    (format 720 kB disk for AT&T M24/28)
    FDFORMAT A: /F:720 M$F7 B$54         (format 720 kB disk for ATARI ST)
    FDFORMAT A: /F:12 D64                (format 1.2 MB disk with 64 RDEs)
    FDFORMAT A: /F:410 R               (format 410 kB Disk without verify)

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF OPTIONS

The Q and the U option

Beginning with version 1.8. FDFORMAT formats disks the same way as DOS-FORMAT of DOS Version 5. If the Q and U options are not specified, FDFORMAT checks, if the diskette is already formatted in the format you have choosen. If this is true, FDFORMAT only verifies the disk and rewrites the System-Area. If the disk is formatted in another format, a real low-level formatting is performed. If you specify the U option, the diskette will be low-level formatted in any case.

The Q option specifies a quick format. FDFORMAT tries to determine the current diskette format and then only rewrites the system area. All options to specify a different format are ignored, if you specify the Q option. FDFORMAT will also skip verifying, if the Q option is selected. If the Q option is selected and FDFORMAT cannot find a valid boot sector, the diskette will be low-level formatted with the format you specified.

The Tnnn option - Use nnn Tracks

This option tells FDFORMAT, how many tracks are to be used. A Standard 360 kB diskette has 40 tracks, all other standard formats have 80 tracks. You can set this option to 1-41 for an 360 kB drive and to 1- 82 for all other drives. The more tracks you use, the more storage you will receive. Some drives allow even more than 41 or 82 tracks, but you may have trouble, when trying to read this diskette on another disk drive. The default is 40 for a 360 kB Drive and 80 for all other drives.

Example: FDFORMAT A: /T:41 (format a disk with 41 Tracks. This will give you 369 kB storage in a 360 kB drive)

The Nnnn option - Use nnn Sectors per Track

This option determines the number of sectors per track you will use. The standard and default values for the different formats are:

    disk format standard value maximum value possible
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