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From: ee163adl@sdcc18.ucsd.EDU (Teh Hsieh)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Mace does **not** unformat floppy disks
Message-ID: <713@sdcc18.ucsd.EDU>
Date: Fri, 22-May-87 13:30:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcc18.713
Posted: Fri May 22 13:30:09 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 16:44:10 EDT
References: <147@lcuxa.UUCP>
Organization: University of California, San Diego
Lines: 25
Summary: Completely formatted floppies are not recoverable

In article <147@lcuxa.UUCP>, mike2@lcuxa.UUCP writes:
> I have Version 4.0 of the Mace Utilities.  The documentation addresses
> only unformatting of hard disks, not floppies.  But, since it does not
> explicitly say that the floppies cannot be unformatted, I experimented
> with trying to do so.  Not surprisingly, the experiment failed (after
> a PC-DOS 3.1 format).  Furthermore, I then examined each sector of the
> reformatted disk, and found that the information was gone.

I have no doubts about this.  In previous postings, the differences between
a hard disk "high-level format" and a floppy "low-level format" under DOS
were discussed.

But, have you tried opening the drive door of the floppy during
format, destroying only the first couple of tracks, and then recover
from that?  The disk has NOT been formatted completely in this
fashion.  All the other tracks would still be INTACT.  Some of
sectors may be unreadable (trashed during format), but after a diskcopy
to a newly formatted floppy can fix this.  Just ignore the error "disk
may be unusable".  THEN try the Mace Utilities to restore the FAT.

I thought the original post of this discussion was that right after the
data disk began to re-format, the formatting process was immediately
stopped and that the disk did not format completely.
-- 
I-Teh Hsieh     ...!sdcsvax!sdcc6!sdcc18!ee163adl