DOS feature on formatting disk - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

18 Jan 2005

...
 I know.  It's another one of those stupid things
that MS did with DOS that
makes absolutely no sense.  Just format the damn disk and report any
errors for the USER to decide.

I once came across some program on the WWW that supposedly rehabilitates
such disks (most likely by doing an LLF on track 0) but unfortunately I
never bookmarked it. 
I used to run into this all the time. When you format a floppy for the 
Mac, DOS will then report the Track 0 error and refuse to reformat it. I 
always just formatted the disk for DOS on my Mac to get around the 
problem (and then got really irked when I was told "The mac is not 
compatible with anything else"... REALLY, not only can I read/write PC 
disks, but I could read/write all the PC users files long before any of 
them had tools to deal with Mac files!)

-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>