Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!asuvax!hrc!force!covertr
From: covertr@force.UUCP (Richard E. Covert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: floppy disk sizes, how to calculate them
Summary: Thanks!!!
Keywords: atari st, c
Message-ID: <45612bbc.14a1f@force.UUCP>
Date: 1 Sep 89 15:37:37 GMT
References: <4552164d.14a1f@force.UUCP> <5735@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Organization: gte
Lines: 28

In article <5735@ttidca.TTI.COM>, woodside@ttidca.TTI.COM (George Woodside) writes:
> While testing Turtle, I wrote a formatter that can do anything possible
> to a disk's format, including marking bad clusters. This fragment should
> answer your questions:
> 
> Clear as mud, right? :^)
> -- 
> *George R. Woodside - Citicorp/TTI - Santa Monica, CA 
> *Path:       ..!{philabs|csun|psivax}!ttidca!woodside

	Thanks George, that is EXACTLY what I was looking for. My application
is part of a series of support programs for the FOREM ST BBS package. I want
to write some programs to ease the use of FOREM. One important program is 
backing up the DOWNLOAD FILE sections of Forem. I will consider your points about 
the floppies (i.e. checking for bad clusters etc). My initial plan was to ask 
the user (SYSOP) for the size of his pre-formatted floppies (# of sides, tracks,
and sectors), and then use that value to bundle the individual files into 
floppy-disk sized groups. Then each group of files would be copied to a pre-formatted
floppy. Now, you are suggesting that I read the size of the floppy before writing
to it. That changes my program because I wouldn't be able to group the files into
disk-sized groups, because the disk size wouldn't be known until the copy takes
place. I could do a sort and group for each fresh floppy but that would increase
the time to perform the backup. Ity might be an idea though. Just ask the user
to insert a fresh pre-formatted floppy , read its size, and then find XX files
that would fill the floppy. Hmmmm, might work...
Well thanks for your ideas!!

richard (gtephx!covertr) covert