FORMAT floppy: Drive_IO error (longish)

I have a floppy which I knew in advance had errors on it, but just for the sake of trying out all the tools, and also to see what got put on the disc by FreeDOS, I tried to format it. The format ran for quite a long time, like tens of minutes, then there was what appeared to be an internal error of some sort.

It is the fact that an internal error seemed to occur that concerns me. Also I am somewhat concerned that one more bad sector was reported in the total than in the detailled list, though much less so. Mostly, the latter is likely just a mis-count, but it might be related to the failure.

Here is the information I collected. Is there more information I should collect, and where should I send it (if not here)?

I was running xdosemu under Fedora Core 2, the floppy was *not* mounted under Linux. This is a 2.7 GHz Celeron single processor Compaq Presario machine with 256MB RAM.

$ uname -a
Linux Presario-1 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 #1 Mon Mar 28 00:50:14 EST 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

In the emulator...

C:\JMCCARTY>format/u a:
(many errors reported here)
...
Sector 2880 CHS=[79:1:18] bad
100 percent completed.
Found 88 bad sectors during formatting.
Preparing FAT area...
100 percent completed.
Drive_IO( command=WRITE sector=24 count=1 ) [FAT12/16] [drive A:]

Critical error encountered while using DOS disk driver DOS driver error (hex): 03
Description: unknown command given to driver
Program terminated.

C:\JMCCARTY>ver /r

FreeCom version 0.82 pl 3 XMS_Swap [Mar 06 2004 10:49:37] DOS version 7.10
FreeDOS kernel version 1.1.35

C:\JMCCARTY>format/?
FreeDOS Format Version 0.91p
Written by Brian E. Reifsnyder (and several contributors). Copyright 1999 - 2004 under the terms of the GNU GPL, Version 2.
...
C:\JMCCARTY>_

Here is the complete list of sectors reported...

[ 2:0: 1] through [ 2:0: 8] inclusive
[ 8:0: 1] through [ 8:0: 8] inclusive
[78:0: 1] through [78:0:17] inclusive
[78:1: 1] through [78:1:18] inclusive
[79:0: 1] through [79:0:18] inclusive
[79:1: 1] through [79:1:18] inclusive

Mike

p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

Thanks. I downloaded the latest and tried again. It is very much faster. It also only found 8 bad sectors (hmm...). But the very same IO error occurred.

So, where do I need to report the problem?

Mike

p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

DOSEMU. It cannot and has never been able to format floppies, to be precise, BIOS int13/ah=5 is not implemented.

Try a Linux tool, e.g. superformat.

Bart

This clears up a lot.

I suppose a user could replace format.com by format.bat, containing "unix superformat /dev/fd0 hd" ?

Regards, Jan

I don't believe so, for a number of reasons.

First, the disc *was* written, and the % completion went up to 100 percent.

Second, the FAT writing was stated to work.

Third, the reported error was a WRITE, not a FORMAT TRACK.

Fourth, I ran the same program on a pure MSDOS 6.0 machine, under the control of an interrupt capture and analysis program I wrote several years ago, and verified that the FORMAT TRACK calls were made during the time that was reporting % complete. The call which appeared to fail was indeed a BIOS WRITE.

Fifth, with a disc which was verified to format properly under MSDOS with the FORMAT.EXE program (latest version) and with MSDOS FORMAT, the program was capable of formatting the disc under DOSEMU.

Unfortunately, I was unable to use my interrupt capture program under DOSEMU, as it always reported not enough memory to load the program. Apparently, the BORLANDC link library code for loading/executing a program doesn't work with DOSEMU for some reason.

Mike

p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

[snip reasons]

OTOH, I degaussed a known-good disc, and FORMAT.EXE was unable to format it under FreeDOS, whereas it was able to under MSDOS 6.0. It failed right away, reporting the FORMAT TRACK call failed.

Nonetheless, it was not the BIOS FORMAT TRACK which failed in the earlier attempt.

Mike

p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!