screwy format message

73701000 lcc at ucscb.UCSC.EDU
Sun Jul 2 10:44:50 AEST 1989


In article <1003 at hawkmoon.MN.ORG> det at hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer) writes:
>Whenever i try to format my (new) 3.5" floppy (1.44M) with a 720K diskette in
>it i get the following message:
>
>$ format /dev/rdsk/f13dt	#lo density device name;  f13ht = hi density
>formatting.
>Formatted 0 tracks: 0 thru 4294967295, interleave 1.
>
>What does this mean?  Is my format broken and is there a newer one out there
>that i can get that will work better?
>

I put a newer format on the bbs in mid February but I don't think that it is
going to resolve that problem. Format works by doing an ioctl on the 
device that was opened to get the geometry info. There is a coding scheme
built into the minor device number of the file (device node) that was opened
and in it contains info such as hi/low density, etc. My guess is that you've
got some way bogus minor device number for f13ht or a corrupted binary.

Ken



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