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MyFormat v1.0 © 1995-97 by Daniel J. Andrea II NOTE: This software is offered as GIFTWARE. If you like it, then you can send me something in payment of your choice (other programs, disks, computers, cars, etc.) at the address at the end of this document. No warranty of any kind is offered with this software or implied, or for suitability of purpose. It's use is entirely at your own risk. No fees can be charged for this software, other than the nominal fees for the cost of magnetic media and copying of the software onto that media, not to exceed the amount of US $5 for a disk containing this software. Copies of this software must include this documentation file for redistribution through Fred Fish or other similar software collections. What is it? =========== MyFormat is a replacement for the Format command. I wrote this because of the original Format that came with both OS2.1 and OS3.1 was severly lacking several handy features which I found useful from Olaf Barthel & MXM's Format replacement. I also found that their program didn't draw the gadgets properly under OS3.1, thus MyFormat was born. MyFormat works under both OS2.x and OS3.x, allowing certain extras under OS3.x. When operating under OS2.x, both OFS and FFS, with or without International mode is available. Under OS3.x, Directory Caching is available. MyFormat does require at least KickStart v37 to run. A quick note here. I've had several users mention they would like to see direct support for MultiFileSystem in MyFormat. This currently is not possible, at least until the MFS author is willing to release info on how to access MFS to change the current filesystem of the device. However, MyFormat does somewhat support the MFS system. If a device's filesystem is changed, either by inserting a different disk or from the MFS commodity, all you have to do is click on the device again within the Drives gadget and everything will be setup to format in the new filesystem. Installation ============ To install, simply copy MyFormat and it's icon to your SYS:System directory. If you want to replace the original Format command, rename MyFormat to Format. MyFormat will work exactly as the original when called from the Workbench. Usage ===== Usage of MyFormat is similar to Format. All the command line arguments from Format are supported, along with some extras for the new features. MyFormat can format disks with or without verifying, and can install a valid bootblock which will work for both OS2.x and OS3.x. There are three new command line arguments, BADSECTORS, BADTRACKS, INSTALL and NOVERIFY. INSTALL tells MyFormat to install a valid 2.x/3.x Bootblock to make the disk bootable. NOVERIFY tells MyFormat to turn off verification of the tracks as they are written to the disk. The rest of the arguments work the same as the original Format's arguments as listed in the DOS reference manual. The arguments BADSECTORS and BADTRACKS, tells MyFormat to mark bad sectors in a FFS/OFS Bitmap if verify is enabled. The BADSECTORS argument tells MyFormat to mark only those sectors found as bad in the verify step, and BADTRACKS will mark the entire track (or "head") for that cylinder as bad. If the NOVERIFY option is included, then BADSECTORS and BADTRACKS are both ignored. BADTRACKS has priority over BADSECTORS (i.e. if both BADTRACKS and BADSECTORS are on the commandline, then BADTRACKS will be chosen. Note: this only works on FFS/OFS disks, and will be disabled for any non-OFS/FFS disks. If MyFormat is started by double-clicking its icon or from the shell with no arguments, it will open a window on the Workbench screen with several gadgets. The Drives gadget shows the available disk drives attached to the system. Just below it is the Size gadget, which shows the number of tracks and the size of the drive in megabytes. At the bottom of the window under the Drives gadget is a status window which shows the current operations of MyFormat. To the right is several checkbox gadgets, and two cycle gadget. The "use Filesystem" cycle gadget selects the FileSystem to use for formatting. Verify Writes turns on and off verification. Install Disk turns on Bootblock installation. Create Icons creates the disk and Trashcan icons for the disk. The "BadBlock marking" cycle gadget enables badblock marking for FFS/OFS floppies, using either sector marking or whole track marking as described in the CLI usage above. It is dsabled on non-FFS/OFS formatted partitions and if verisy is disabled. The Auto Start function is used to set a two second delay for auto-formatting of a disk inserted into any of the available drives. This feature allows almost hands-free operation for multiple disk formatting. This option is not available from the command line. If you plan to use this with MFS running, set the filesystem you want to format to in the MFS commodity BEFORE you set the Auto Start mode and insert a disk. Not doing so can cause unpredictable results, and you may not get the filesystem you wanted the disk formatted as. Also, MyFormat may read the values from the device entry while MFS is changing things around and get bad info, possibly causing a crash (I haven't had this happen yet, but it is possible). There's no way around this situation, until the author of MFS releases the info on how to set the filesystem within MFS. The last gadgets are the Name, Start, Quick, and Stop gadgets in the bottom of the window. The Name gadget is a text gadget into which you can enter the volume name for the disk to be formatted. Default name is "Empty". The Start gadget starts formatting the whole disk, and the Quick gadget starts formatting using the quick-format option. The format can be interrupted at any time by pressing the Stop gadget. During formatting operations several of the gadgets are disabled which are options that cannot be changed. Those which are not disabled may be changed at any time during format operations. Note: The Drive gadget does not show as disabled under OS2.x because there is currently no way to disable that type of gadget under OS2.x. Any activity in or on that gadget will be ignored by the program during format operations. Bugs ==== There are no known bugs at this time. If you find any, please contact me at the E-Mail address or Snail-Mail address below with bug reports. Be sure to include information on what other software was running and what kind of system you have. Bug fixes will be incorporated into MyFormat as soon as possible. Note: I have received some complaints about the size information not being correct for some devices. There is a program called ReadDevice included in this archive. It is a Shell only program for reading device info from the Dos.library's devicelist in memory. For example, to read info on DF0:, type this: readdevice df0: or for redirecting the output readdevice >t:temp df0: this will produce output to the standard output, in this case the shell's console. Redirect the output of the program using standard file redirection and include the output of the program in an e-mail letter to the address below. This should help me figure out how to correct the problem. Also, include info about what software is used to run the device, i.e. CrossDOS for PC format floppies, etc. Also, I have had at least one person report not being able to format a floppy with the CrossMAC filesystem. The track format goes fine, but the initialize process fails. I cannot find anything in my code that could be causing this, so if anyone else has tried MyFormat with CrossMAC, please let me know by email your results, both good and bad. I am trying to get in contact with someone at Consultron, but have not heard back from them as of yet. Update: v1.20 seems to have fixed this. Please let me know if you still have problems formatting CrossMAC disks with MyFormat. There have also been reports of not being able to format large drives, like the Iomega Zip, when using CrossDOS. I have tried to find a problem in MyFormat, but cannot see what could be going wrong. The best I can figure, unless I have a REALLY obscure bug, is the CrossDOS driver can't handle larger disks properly when initializing. I have tried several different methods with my Zip drive, but cannot get it to format the drive either. As of a full month after sending Consultron the email concerning CrossMAC, I have not heard anything. If anyone is a registered user of CrossMAC and/or CrossDOS, please get in contact with them so I can find out what is wrong. Have them contact me if possible. History ======= v1.0 -- Initial release. v1.01 -- Fixed minor bug in setting of Use_Filesystem gadget during startup and selection of drive to format. Also recompiled with SAS/C v6.55 v1.02 -- Changed operation of Use_Filesystem gadget so that it is disabled on disks not using the standard Amiga Filesystem. e.g. PC formatted disks, PFS formatted disks, etc. v1.03 -- Changed arrangement of gadgets and how MyFormat responds to Workbench menu originated formats. v1.04 -- OOPS! Bug creeped in during rearrangement of gadgets in 1.03 regarding Auto Start. Fixed so that Auto Start defaults to whole disk formatting. v1.05 -- Altered Auto Start code to notify user at end of format with a DisplayBeep call. v1.06 -- Changed disk change sensing method to recognize all diskchanges. This change was needed because the A3000's scsi.device didn't recognize the command I originally used for sensing disk changes. This should now work with all removable media drives. It works fine with my Iomega Zip drive on the A3000 scsi.device as unit 5. v1.07 -- Found a bug in the disk type and size sensing code for non-Amiga formatted disks. This mainly affected disks greater than 50 megs (the OFS size limit). Now works. Also has been recompiled with SAS/C 6.56. Also, this is first version to be uploaded to Aminet. v1.08 -- Fix minor bug in size info calulations which caused some really weird size info to be placed in the size gadget. Bug did not affect formatting the disk, just the size reported in the window. Thanks to Jon Peterson for help in tracking this down. v1.09ß -- Internal test versions during BadBlock marking development. thru Never released. v1.12ß v1.13ß -- Now includes Bad Block marking for FFS/OFS formatted partitions. thru This can be set to either mark sectors or whole tracks as used v1.15ß in the bitmap. Added warning messages for bad sectors on the RootBlock track and/or track 0. Beta versions, not released. v1.16 -- v1.15ß passed testing, and is now released to Aminet after re-compiling. v1.17 -- The new warning messages were too long for screens less than 800 pixels wide. Re-formatted the text. v1.18 -- An elusive bug, which I never saw, was discovered by Carsten Sorensen in the GUI layout code. I had mistakenly, way back in v1.03, set the topedge of some gadgets to a set value, rather than adjusting them according to the screen's font. This has now been fixed. Also turned the optimizer back on in SAS/C with size optimization. This cut the size of the code by a little more than 1K over no optimization for v1.18. Might even be a little faster as well. v1.19 -- Well, I did find another stupid bug on my part. :-\ I had created the BadBlocks type gadget with some bad info in the list it used for defining the available settings. Caused some problems with MCP's cycle-to-menu option (caused lockups). I'm surprised this didn't show up until now. Also removed a call that would force the window to the front whenever AutoStart mode is enabled. I will be making some changes in MyFormat 2.0 to make this optional, since it is rather annoying to have the Workbench screen pop to the front while trying to read email on Thor's own screen. v1.20 -- Found another rather obscure bug, though I don't think it ever affected anything. I had mistakenly set the dostype for the disk initialization to always be an Amiga type, as in FFS. I had thought this might be why the CrossDOS formatting of larger disks didn't work, but it didn't change anything on formatting my Zip drive to PC format. See the note above about bugs and Consultron for more info. Now compiled with SAS/C 6.58. Extra nore on 1.20: This bugfix seems to have fixed the CrossMAC formatting problem. If anyone still has problems with this, let me know. Also included a new version of readdevice with this re-upload. Readdevice was causing some Enforcer hits when string pointers in the device entry are not set. Now it includes some more pointer checks for those entries and will accept device names with or without the ':'. Author ====== I can be contacted through Internet E-Mail at: dandrea@unix.tfs.net or through Snail-Mail at: Daniel J. Andrea II 1331 Metropolitan St. Leavenworth, KS 66048 U.S.A. To check up on MyFormat development and other projects when they arise, point your web browser at http://www.tfs.net/~dandrea/ MyFormat was developed on an Amiga 500 with a Microbotics VXL*30/RAM*32 accelerator and on a 25 MHz A3000 using SAS/C v6.0 thru v6.3 and v6.55 thru v6.58. Future ====== Next I will try to work in a reworked, font-sensitive GUI as well as locale support. Thanks ====== Many thanks to my beta-testers from v1.13ß-v1.15ß: Iwan Heskamp, Ron Burman, Jon Peterson, Max Headroom (? not sure if this is real name), and Javier De Las Rivas Fdez. There was one other , but all I have is "Software Solutions" for a name and that he is in the Bahamas. Thanks to you all. Also, thanks to Carsten Sorensen for pointing out the bug fixed in v1.18.