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From: leonard@percival.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Format problems on AT clone...
Message-ID: <691@percival.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 10-Jun-87 14:14:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: percival.691
Posted: Wed Jun 10 14:14:00 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jun-87 07:49:24 EDT
References: <717@cod.UUCP>
Reply-To: leonard@percival.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Percy's UNIX, Portland, OR.
Lines: 23

I've encountered problems formatting floppies (esp 1.2 meg) on a couple
of AT clones at work.  Problems occur with both MSDOS 3.1 & PC-DOS 3.1.

I can now format 360k floppies after reducing the number of buffers in
CONFIG.SYS from 40 to 36. (it works, but _why_?!)

I still couldn't format 1.2 meg disks until I happened to try the 
"format a disk" option from our user menu program. After much investigation
I found a "solution". Go into BASIC and type SHELL "FORMAT A:"

Obviously, there is something broken in the environment, but what?

Another AT (clone)  will format ok, but after _completing_ the format
gives a "Track 0 bad, disk unusable" error. The disks *are* usable,
they pass CHKDSK, Norton''s DT, and Mace Utilities Diagnose. 

I hope all this will help some guru track down the source of this
problem. 
-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]		...!tektronix!reed!percival!!bucket!leonard
"I used to be a hacker. Now I'm a 'microcomputer specialist'.
You know... I'd rather be a hacker."