fdformat
Fdformat is the name of two unrelated programs, both performing "low-level format" of floppy disks.
DOS tool
[edit]FDFORMAT is written by Christoph H. Hochstätter in Pascal. It allows users to format a floppy to a higher than usual density, enabling the user to store up to 300 kilobytes more data on a normal high density 3.5" floppy disk. It also increases the speed of diskette I/O on these specially formatted disks using a technique called "Sector Sliding". In this technique, the physical sectors on the disk are ordered in such a way that when the drive advances to the next track, the next logical sector waiting to be read is immediately available to the read head.
Linux tool
[edit]The Linux fdformat program works with the kernel floppy driver. It simply formats a floppy disk using whatever parameters is already known to the system.[1] The setfdprm can be used to provide the system with unusual formatting parameters with which to format.[2]
Functionality similar to Hochstätter's FDFORMAT is provided by fdutils, written by Alain Knaff.[3]
See also
[edit]- DMF, a high-density diskette format used by Microsoft
- VGA-Copy, a similar program that allowed higher floppy disk capacity
- XDF, a high-density diskette format used by IBM
References
[edit]External links
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