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From: djw@hpldsla.sid.hp.com (David Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: MSDOS formater
Message-ID: <27740008@hpldsla.sid.hp.com>
Date: 28 Jan 91 19:55:43 GMT
References: <1991Jan24.101341.1327@urz.unibas.ch>
Organization: HP Scientific Instruments Division - Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 27

> ............................................ormater of TOS 1.4. But I look for
> a formater that also writes all the other stuff ecaxtly like MSDOS does in the
> standard way. So that after formating nobody can see, if it was formated on a
> MSDOS PC (say MSDOS 3.2) or on the ST. The use would be, that no utility that
> claims to read/write MSDOS disk would deny to handle such a disk. The utility
> could be on any machine (Mac, SUN,...). There are such utilitie, that only
> partaly handle the MSDOS bootsector parameters. One is GEMDOS another is MSDOS
> itself.

This does not answer your question directly, but it may give you
some ideas.

I have  much  the same  problem  as you, I need to make  3.5inch
MS-DOS  disks  that can be read on Atari, HP Un*x,  MS-DOS,  and
maybe  others.  The disks get  created  (typically)  at the Un*x
site.  What I did was  format  a disk on  MS-DOS,  then  made an
image  copy of the  disk on  Unix.  That  is, I  copied  all the
sectors  from the disk into a  standard  Un*x file (for the Un*x
heads:  dd if=/dev/rfd/my_disk  of=dos_image bs=512).  Now, when
I want to make a dos disk on Un*x, I hard  format  the disk (lay
the tracks  down), then image copy the dos image back to the new
floppy media (dd if=dos_image of=/dev/rfd/my_disk bs=512).  It's
a bit slow, but works  great.  As it is  possible  to read,  and
write the raw disk on the Atari, I see no reason that this would
not work on the Atari.  Just ideas..

djw@hpldsla.hp.com