> I am reminded that the Kaypro program MFDISK - a sort of mini-UniForm -
> had a feature that took a 'guess' at what format the foreign disk in the
> drive was. It wasn't always right, and its choices were somewhat
> limited, but it would be interesting to see how they approached it.
Format selection assistance is not new.
Howard Fulmer of Morrow was attempting to add that in to the multiple
format capability of the Morrow machines.
XenoCopy-PC has/had an undocumented capability: in the format selection
menu, it could be asked to look at the alien disk. It would then
"gray-out" physically different formats. Specifically, it would look at
number of sides, bytes per sector, and sectors per track. It remained
undocumented because it was OFTEN unacceptably wrong. There were a
surprisingly large number of diskettes that were FORMATTED both sides but
only used one side, or had more formatted sectors than were used! (8
sectors per track, but 9 sectors per track formatted!)
There are a number of other parameters that are not feasable (although not
necessarily impossible) to automatically sense, including side-PATTERN,
skew/interleave, number of reserved tracks, records per block, etc.
There were also a few problems with unreasonable expectations - there were
a few customers who expected the format selection assistance to render
possible formats that were otherwise physically impossible for the PC
hardware to do. There were even some folk who were ADAMENT that Apple ][
diskettes could be read by the PC, since they were the same diameter and
turned at 300RPM, and that therefore we were part of some sort of
CONSPIRACY to prevent the conversion.
--
Fred Cisin cisin_at_xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
PO Box 1236 (510) 558-9366
Berkeley, CA 94701-1236
Received on Thu Oct 05 2000 - 19:03:55 BST