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From: tporczyk@na.excelan.com (Tony Porczyk)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: Need a batch oriented diskette format utility
Message-ID: <1991Apr13.075448.19804@novell.com>
Date: 13 Apr 91 14:17:57 GMT
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Reply-To: tporczyk@na.excelan.com (Tony Porczyk)
Organization: Standard Disclaimer
References: <142@ims.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1991 07:54:48 GMT

In article <142@ims.UUCP> ericm@ims.UUCP (Eric Martinson) writes:
>I am in need of a tool that will allow me to format floppy diskettes
>from a batch file.
>This process is used in the creation of distribution media
>for our product.  There are a number of kludgy ways to get some versions
>of FORMAT (the one provided with most DOS systems) to do the job but
>it is not very portable from DOS to DOS (V3.21, V3.30, V4.01, etc).
>I have tried PCFORMAT from Central Point, and it absolutely doesn't
>do this, neither does Norton Utilities format program.

First with Norton - have you tried "SF a: /a" ?  That should take care
of it (assuming you have proper switches after a:.  But I understand
that you might not want to rely on an external utility for building
ditribution diskettes.  I am sure you've tried:
format a: /[whatever switch] < c:\format.rsp
where format.rsp contains of character 13 on the first line, character
13 on the second line, N on the third line, and nothing on the fourth
line. It's worked for me with DOSes up to 5.0...

Tony