Re: What about FORMAT?

Hello,

>
> I will be helping Andreas with scan disk, and ther is also a dosfsck
comming,
> what do you think of spawning one of these programs to do the work?

Better yet, if the disk scanning engine could be used as a library, I could
just compile it into format.

> > Format can format fat32 but the fat32 format may not be completely
> > compatible with other operating systems.  (i.e. Windows 9x.)  The fat32
file
> > system is at least 99% of what is needed in order to work with other
> > operating systems.
>
> That is 99% good news ;-)

The 1% bad news is that I don't quite understand why it doesn't work.  I
have done a byte-by-byte comparision of the FAT32 filesystem created by M$'s
format and my format program and there isn't a difference...with the
exception of the fact that the FreeDOS kernel works with my FAT32 file
system implementation and M$ Win 98 doesn't.   :-(

>
> I hope that you can find some time soon. I will be helping with other
things
> in whatever time I can find. The real problem with FORMAT is not the
coding,
> but the information needed to catch up with you to beging anything...

I am working on "finding" the time.

> Maybe what we can do is just get the surface scan procedure that Andreas
is
> working on and make it into a lib for both programs?

Excellent idea.  How far along is this surface scanning code?

> > Another version of Free FDISK is being worked on at this time.
>
> FDISK is fine, FWIK it need only small improuvements :)
> The normal and simple cases should work fine

Yes, I know.  But, it has a couple minor problems with extremely large hard
drives (>128GB), needs international language support, needs regression
tested, and has a few bugs left to fix.  In addition, I don't think it will
work with hard disks > 512GB at this time.   :-)

Regards,

Brian Reifsnyder
[email protected]