More fun with FORMAT (Was: Fun with degaussers

Track 0 problems during FORMAT can also be due to a bug that was present in most versions of FORMAT. Although "segment:offset" notation can start a segment at any physical address that is divisible by 16, the DMA used by the IBM style of disk controller board couldn't handle having the buffer straddle any of the 16 64k boundaries! Since the buffer ended up in different places according to what TSRs and device drivers were loaded, you could end up with the buffer straddling the boundary and INT13 operations failing. (INT13 error code 9) FORMAT misreported the problem by only saying that track 0 was bad. Competent programming would have both correctly identified the problem, and would have then switched, whenever an error 9 occurred) to an alternate location in the segment for the buffer. But this is MICROS~1. Join the campaign to make billg into a millionaire. What YOU can try is to change the location in memory where FORMAT lands, by deleting or ADDING one more TSR. -- Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com 2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366 Berkeley, CA 94710-2219