Date   : Tue, 04 Sep 2001 06:53:34 -0700 (PDT)
From   : Thomas Harte <t.harte@...>
Subject: Re: Format woes

>  I think I got my copy of the BBC Micro welcome disc from the BBC Lives
>  site (can't remember the URL offhand..)

I'm also failrly sure 8bs - http://www.8bs.com - carry most of the welcome
discs. But notice that if you're using a new-ish (last five or six years,
maybe older) IBM PC, that probably won't help you much because single
density mode tends to be broken on those nowadays.

That said, you could probably knock up a genuine format tool in a few
hundred lines of BASIC, and a simple wipe command in even less. Check out
the 8271 datasheet and the DFS sector layout (which I've only seen
documented as a byproduct the Watford DFS 62 file DFS extension document -
which is on The BBC Lives!). And there is probably an OSWORD or something
like that to write sectors, so you may not even need the 8271 datasheet for
a simple wipe program.

-Thomas





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