20 Aug
2007
20 Aug
'07
5:18 a.m.
Windows and
even "bare" DOS try and read block 0 to see what kind of
disk it is - if it's unreadable in a certain way, it fails with "track
0 bad" ... You can't even format these disks.
Well, DOS 6.x had the /f switch on the FORMAT command--which told DOS
to forget about trying to read the disk, just format it. I believe
that DOS 7.x ignores /f. And for DOS, there are always third-party formatters.
Exactly which is why I suggested ImageDisk - with a blank disk
image, it's basically a third-party formatter. Anything that will
format the disk without having to read it first (not even a little)
should work.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html