Jump to content

fdformat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from FDR88.EXE)

Fdformat is the name of two unrelated programs, both performing "low-level format" of floppy disks.

DOS tool

[edit]

FDFORMAT is written by Christoph H. Hochstätter in Pascal. It allows users to format a floppy to a higher than usual density, enabling the user to store up to 300 kilobytes more data on a normal high density 3.5" floppy disk. It also increases the speed of diskette I/O on these specially formatted disks using a technique called "Sector Sliding". In this technique, the physical sectors on the disk are ordered in such a way that when the drive advances to the next track, the next logical sector waiting to be read is immediately available to the read head.

Linux tool

[edit]

The Linux fdformat program works with the kernel floppy driver. It simply formats a floppy disk using whatever parameters is already known to the system.[1] The setfdprm can be used to provide the system with unusual formatting parameters with which to format.[2]

Functionality similar to Hochstätter's FDFORMAT is provided by fdutils, written by Alain Knaff.[3]

See also

[edit]
  • 2M, a similar program that offers even higher capacity
  • DMF, a high-density diskette format used by Microsoft
  • VGA-Copy, a similar program that allowed higher floppy disk capacity
  • XDF, a high-density diskette format used by IBM

References

[edit]
  1. ^ fdformat(8) – Linux Programmer's Manual – Administration and Privileged Commands
  2. ^ setfdprm(8) – Linux Programmer's Manual – Administration and Privileged Commands
  3. ^ "Fdutils - Linux floppy tuning utilities".
[edit]