Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!cmcl2!adm!smoke!w8sdz
From: w8sdz@smoke.BRL.MIL (Keith B. Petersen )
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: Maxi-Form (format big disks) doesn't work
Message-ID: <9700@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 24 Feb 89 05:55:03 GMT
References: <51610@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: w8sdz@brl.arpa (Keith B. Petersen (WSMR|towson) <w8sdz>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 28

In article <51610@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> spolsky-joel@CS.Yale.EDU (Joel Spolsky) writes:
>I just downloaded Maxi-Form from c.b.i.p. Unfortunately, it doesn't
>work. It manages to format 800K disks on my PS/2-30, but those disks
>don't work properly. When I tried to copy things onto them I got a
>"sector not found" error. Not very encouraging, I don't think I will
>trust my data to this program.
>
>At this point I would highly recommend AGAINST using this program.

The reason you had trouble is that the archive that was posted was not
complete.  There is another file called SMAX.COM, which is a TSR to
correct for the problem you mentioned.  The author supplies this file in
the original distribution.  Apprently whoever put that archive together
didn't know about that.

The program makes patches to the running operating system in RAM in
order to allow for the larger diskette format.  I've tried it and it
does work but it seems to get confused if you insert a regular 360K
diskette after reading one of the diskettes with the special format.
I wasn't able to determine just what the pattern of events was that
caused this but after having intermittant problems reading some
diskettes I gave up on MAXI.

-- 
Keith Petersen
Maintainer of the CP/M & MSDOS archives at wsmr-simtel20.army.mil [26.0.0.74]
DDN: w8sdz@wsmr-simtel20.army.mil
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