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From: csbrod@medusa.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Claus Brod )
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: format program
Message-ID: <2712@medusa.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Date: 8 May 90 07:50:14 GMT
References: <3357@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca>
Organization: CSD, University of Erlangen, W-Germany
Lines: 24

depeche@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Sam Alan EZUST) writes:

>I also want to be able to format 10 sectors/track. Unfortunately, the
>procedure which writes boot sectors, Protobt, has 4 possible disk
>types, none of which are 10sectors/track.

Right, Protobt can give you four different standard disk parameter
sets only. If you want to have your own non-standard format (and
10 sectors are non-standard though perfectly safe) you'll have to
patch your bootsector yourself. No big deal, really, because you can
call Protobt first to create a standard BPB block in your bootsector
and then change some values like sectors per track, sectors per disk
and so on.

>And for double-sided disks, isn't it necessary to zero the second
>side of track 0 as well [if it is necessary to do the first side].

You should zero all FAT sectors and all sectors of the root directory.
Some early formatters wrote a $E5 pattern to the root directory, but
this leads to very long search times in the root dir. ($E5 means "hey,
GEMDOS, this dir entry has been deleted, but there might be some valid
entry after me").

Claus Brod