========================== Formatter 2.7 ============================= ====================================================================== A floppy disk formatting program, written by Olaf 'Olsen' Barthel of MXM. Copyright, © 1990 by MXM. Shareware, all rights reserved. No guarantee of any kind is made that the program(s) described in this document are 100% reliable. You use this material on your own risk. ============================== Purpose =============================== ====================================================================== The standard 'format' command surely does a brilliant job, since it gets around with any device driver and partitions of any size. But which data media is formatted most oftenly? Floppy disks (3½" format hardwired to the Amiga computer) of course. 'Formatter 2.7' was written to fit the niche for fast(er) and user friendlier floppy disk formatting programs. It also shows how to format file systems in general and how to get AmigaDOS to accept them. =============================== Usage ================================ ====================================================================== 'Formatter 2.7' can be called both from Shell and Workbench. Note that arp.library is required to run the program (Yuck!). The following command line parameters are supported: Drive.......... This can be any disk drive from DF0: through DF3: as long as it's really connected. You will get an error message if the disk drive cannot be found in the current DOS mountlist. NAME/K......... The name you wish the formatted disk to receive. Any name longer than 31 characters will be truncated. FAST/S......... No secret fast formatting tricks yet, this option is similar to the 'QUICK' switch of the standard 'format' command: if enabled only the root block and the boot block of the disk will be rewritten (clearing all relevant data). If your disks have already been formatted clearing those blocks can save much time. INSTALL/S...... If you want to use the formatted disk as a bootable AmigaDOS disk,'Formatter 2.7' will install it just as if you had used the AmigaDOS 'Install' command on it. VERIFY/S....... If enabled, each write access to disk will be verified, i.e. the disk blocks being written will be reread and compared with the source data. Needless to say, verification slows down the disk formatting process but helps to tell the good disks from the corrupt ones. AUTOSTART/S.... If enabled, any disk inserted into the specified drive will be formatted automatically. This saves some time if lots of disks have to be formatted one after the other. FFS/S.......... In behalf of the new Kickstart release, the fast file system is supported as well. The disk receives the FFS IDs where the standard format program places them. A small window will pop up on the Workbench screen (right under the mouse pointer if possible). The window will look like this (well, roughly, I never claimed being a graphic artist, did I?): #X#Formatter2.6======================##|## |.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. | <- Track numbers || | | | | | | | | |----------------------------------------| | | <- Process indicator |------------+--+-------------+----------| | Auto start | | Fast format | | <- Some gadgets |------------+ +-------------+ Start | |Verify write| |Install disk | | <- Some more gadgets |--------+-+-+------+-+-------++ +-------| | DF0: | | DF1: | | DF2: | | DF3: | <- Drive selection |--------+ +--------+ +--------+ +-------| | +------------------------------| | Name: | Blank | <- Name string gadget | +------------------------------| +----------------------------------------+ Control should be intuitively (why shouldn't it, you're running Intuition anyway, aren't you?), if you've understood the command line options (to which the gadgets somehow correspond to) you should get along with the rest of the program easily. ========================= Keyboard shortcuts ========================= ====================================================================== To make life easier, each gadget in the control window can be enabled/toggled via keyboard. These shortcuts are supported through the Intuition menu attached to the 'Formatter 2.7' window. About... (-> ?) Display a short program info. Auto start (-> A) Toggle auto-start option Fast format (-> F) Toggle fast formatting Verify write (-> V) Toggle write verification Install disk (-> I) Toggle disk installation Use FFS (-> U) Toggle FastFileSystem support Drive DFx: (1..4) Select a disk drive to be formatted Modify stepdelay (-> M) Modify the drive step delay rates Start formatting (-> S) This should speak for itself Quit (-> Q) Close the window and leave the program ====================== Formatter 2.7 vs. format ====================== ====================================================================== 'Formatter 2.7' is limited to the 3½" drives hardwired to the Amiga computer, no other filesystems will be formatted (I haven't tried yet, but I suppose that 5¼" drives won't be formatted either). The disks will be formatted using either the old standard file system or the FastFileSystem. Formatting time is well below the time 'format' needs; formatting a disk without verify takes between 47 and 50 seconds, if verify is enabled formatting will take between 1:34 and 1:40 minutes. You are daring and adventurous? Why not try to modify the step delay rate of your disk drives? A little change can provide a welcome speedup. The step delay rate usually is about 3000 ms. Most drives will feel happy with about 2000 ms, some will even work with step rates below 1800 ms. 'Formatter 2.7' will bring up a small menu allowing you to adjust the step delay rate for all connected disk drives. These settings may be saved to/restored from disk. Caution: You are doing quite dangerous things in modifying the default values! ============================== Credits =============================== ====================================================================== Credits go to Mark Rinfret for the very, very basic disk formatting routines employed by his harddisk backup program. It took some time to spy out the default disk format information. The block types were picked up both from Ralph Babel's 'Amiga Guru' book and the Bantam AmigaDOS Programmers' manual. =============================== Author =============================== ====================================================================== This program was written by Olaf Barthel of MXM. All files have been placed in the public domain. You may freely distribute this material, even a small copy fee is okay but everything which looks like commercial distribution is forbidden. Still you may use this material for software development without giving credit to the original author. The program and the accompanying files are distributed as Shareware. If you like 'Formatter 2.7' and use it frequently, please send at least 7 US$ or DM 15,- to cover our media costs. If you enclose a self adressed (and stamped) envelope (note: Germany only, for all other countries enclose postage separately) you will receive new material and updates from MXM. Send new program revisions, comments, bug reports, donations, unmarried sisters, non-poisoned candy, home-grown palm trees, horoscopes, promising capital investments, etc. to: Olaf Barthel, MXM Brabeckstrasse 35 D-3000 Hannover 71 Federal Republic of Germany ============ Revision history (most recent change first) ============= ====================================================================== V2.7 The name of the disk inserted is displayed if autostart is enabled. The program will wait three seconds in which the 'Stop'-button can be pressed to cancel the formatting process. V2.6 The data verification is handled by the blitter. Added an option to modify the step delay rate of all connected disk drives. V2.5 This version will also format the sector label information available for each disk track. The additional 352 bytes will be set to zero. Window height and gadgets will be adapted to reflect the current system font settings. Unfortunately, this does not affect the string gadget border. V2.4a Very much the same as Formatter 2.4, different only in parts of the user interface. The older release did not handle menus/gadgets correctly. V2.4 The bootblock installation process obviously never worked, this has been fixed. Funny enough, if several disk I/O requests were queued, the root track was not written correctly. This occured particularly often on Turbo-Amigas or A3000 computers. Holger Lubitz suggested that the disks should be validated after the formatting process. If two Formatters were run simultaneously, the disk validator could accidentally modify the contents of the rootblock. All known other errors have been fixed. V2.3 The disk formatting and verification process have been sped up greatly. The disk root block is written during formatting rather than after it. The data on disk will be verified after the disk has been formatted and will start at track 79 going down to track 0. There is a debug switch available from Shell. If a verification error occurs, both track buffers will be written to RAM:. V2.2 Added a menu and FastFileSystem support. Applied small changes to the code to make the program work smoother. V2.1 Removed a bunch of suspicious code passages which caused the various gadgets to get mixed up by the message broadcast system. V2.0 A complete rewrite of the original program, first public release. V1.0 A very limited disk formatting program. *