[Freedos-devel] FORMAT 0.91l (pre-)released

[Eric A. <eric@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE>]

Hi all! Yes, there is a new version again! And it is called 0.91l (that is
indeed an L as in LAME) :-).

http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~eric/stuff/soft/by-others/ format-0.91l.zip

First of all, the danger zip thing has been removed. Instead, there are
three new and shiny features / "long" options. Do not ask me to use REAL
long options. I am not keen on improving the getopt implementation used.

/Z:seriously - this option means that you SERIOUSLY want to format that
  harddisk, so you will not be prompted for confirmation!
/Z:mirror    - this option just saves mirror data for UNFORMAT but does
  not actually FORMAT the drive. Note that the mirror data is written to
  a fixed location (how would you find it back otherwise?) and that FORMAT
  shows no mercy if that location (end of the partition) is already used
  by other data...
/Z:unformat  - this option "plays back" the recorded mirror data. So it
  does just what UNFORMAT will do. As usual, an UNFORMAT which is not done
  to repair an accidental FORMAT will in most cases just trash your FAT and
  your root directory! Root directory restore is limited to 1 cluster in the
  FAT32 case.

So FreeDOS FORMAT 0.91L now contains all the functionality of MIRROR and
UNFORMAT for all FAT types (FAT12, FAT16, FAT32). Actually, MIRROR has the
extra ability to save the partition table and UNFORMAT *should* (not yet!)
have the ability to do "RECOVER drive" restoration if no mirror data exists,
so the tools are still useful in their standalone versions.

Explanation: RECOVER drive will *zap* the root directory and FAT and then
try to restore it. Either from mirror data (usually works okay if mirror is
recent) or by scanning the whole drive for directories and doing a global
UNDELETE (very risky). Our FreeDOS 1.0 TODO list, as far as I know, only
asks for RECOVER file mode - RECOVER drive mode is just too risky, and
it is a synonym for UNFORMAT /"without mirror data" anyway.
RECOVER file mode means "try to recover some files" and is basically the
same as UNDELETE. The suggestion is to include that functionality in CHKDSK
(SCANDISK).


Talking about SCANDISK... Jim Tabor, listen, our SCANDISK is crap. It should
be REMOVED from the distro until it is turned into an user interface for our
very nice CHKDSK filesystem checker (even has surface scan. For FAT32, you
have to have an 386+ CPU and enough RAM and use DOSDOSFSCK-2.8-FAT32 instead!)
... It is a known bug that SCANDISK just *looks* nice but hangs at once.

Okay. So far for that. Last goodie in FORMAT 0.91L: It does the drive LOCK
and UNLOCK automatically if DOS version 7 or newer (Win9x...) is detected now.



If FORMAT should now work in all aspects except
- 720k floppy format
- inability to format harddisks under WinNT/Win2000/WinXP (??)
- problems caused by the underlying DOS (cluster size 64k, FAT > 16 MB big)
under all relevant host (Win-) DOS versions for all FAT types (12/16/32)
and has acceptable speed and makes all relevant versions of CHKDSK and
DOSFSCK and (not FreeDOS-!) SCANDISK happy enough now,
THEN I would like to release it officially as FORMAT 0.92 (finally!).

So please get your test systems ready and start testing ;-).
Win2000 problems are by design of Win2000, and cluster size selection should
be done in correct way by the kernel (e.g. WinXP can use 64k clusters and it
can use FAT32 > 16 MB FAT size, but Win9x cannot), so I am not planning to
make FORMAT able to override this decision. Support for 720k floppy format
in 1440k drives (and 360k format in 1200k drives, probably!?) will be added
at a later point. Lots of settings are done for floppy sizing, but it seems
that I have forgotten some (done: 13.17 13.18 DDTP 13.0 13.5)...

Happy FORMATing!

Eric.

PS: FreeDOS MIRROR / UNFORMAT seems to use another data format. Would be
better if FORMAT was compatible to that, but because MIRROR is FAT16 only
anyway and FORMAT can "mirror" and "unformat" FAT12 and FAT32 as well, I
think "better FORMAT is compatible to its own unformat mode than to something
else which does not exist yet anyway". Feel free to find the data format
differences and suggest fixes, of course (savefs.c is the place to go).