Formatting and verifying MFM hard disks

As I have been sorting and cleaning over Thanksgiving, I decided that I would build up an extra PC clone for the sole purpose of formatting and verifying various types of media, such as SCSI, IDE, and MFM hard drives and 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 floppies. I originally planned on just tossing an MFM card and SCSI card into an older AMD K6-2 233, and installing two floppy drives. But, as I got started, I remembered how the old MFM drive controllers worked, and how they kinda take over the boot process. Also, since MFM drives need to be low level formatted for a specific controller before they can be high level formatted, I can't really just format them from Linux. I found a Seagate card that has a nice boot screen with a drive formatting utility, but it only handles eight different Seagate drives. I've got a couple of other old controllers, none of which have such a nice utility, and all of which prevent me from booting from CDROM (they intervene before the BIOS boots from a disk, and when the MFM card can't boot a hard drive, it tries floppy drives, but it doesn't see the CDROM, and won't return control of the boot process back to the PC's built in controllers) Also, in this process, I realized that I can't find my DOS disks! It's been a long time since I booted DOS, and an even longer time since I've messed with DOS on XT's, so I don't know where the disks are. What I think I need is a disk with DOS 3.x and debug. I remember having to use debug to invoke the built in formatting program on most hard drive controllers. Anyway, what I really want to do, is have a computer that would have an MFM card in it, and be able to work with any MFM drive. I'd also like to still be able to boot off an IDE hard drive or a CDROM, since I want to install Linux on an IDE drive on the motherboard's controller, and use that for high level formatting. I can probably work around that by having a Lilo bootdisk, and booting that first, then the system could continue booting from an IDE drive. But, if I did this, what is the best way to do low level formatting on MFM drives? Is there a way to invoke the card's internal formatter from Linux? It's been a while since I worked with this stuff, can anyone refresh my memory? Thanks! Ian Primus ian_primus(a)yahoo.com