Boot Disk Needed

From: Chris <mythtech_at_Mac.com>
Date: Tue Oct 2 13:54:53 2001

>/U (do a REAL format) is faster for you than
>/Q (DON'T do a real format, just write an empty directory) ??
>
>Would you care to post some measured times for how much faster it is?

Speed will be HIGHLY dependant on what size disk it is. A 360k disk
formats with /u fairly fast, and although it is STILL quicker to do /q,
it isn't a huge difference... however, when doing a 1.4 disk, it cam be
the difference between over a minute and under 10 seconds. /q is
basically the same as doing "del *.*", it doesn't reformat the disk at
all, it just rewrites the FAT so the disk thinks it is blank, the fastest
way to clear a disk is "format a: /q /u"... UNLESS there are only a few
items on it, then del *.* might edge it out

Also, with all this /u business... be careful when doing that on 5.25"
disks in a high density drive. If you put a DD disk in, and do format /u,
it will NOT warn you that it is going to attempt to format a DD disk as
HD. In MS DOS, when you format on a HD 5.25 drive, it automatically tries
to format HD... you need to specify the format size (or use /4) to format
360k... leaving off the /u will warn you that the format is different
then what you are about to try. Unfortuantly, leaving off the /u ALSO
fails to remap bad sectors, AND saves the unformat info adding a few more
seconds onto the disk format.

None of this warning business applies to 3.5" drives, they will detect
the HD vs DD disk, and format correctly... so with those it is safe to
always use /u if you want to.

-chris

<http://www.mythtech.net>
Received on Tue Oct 02 2001 - 13:54:53 BST

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