Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation,
advertising materials, and other materials related to such
distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed
by the University of California, Berkeley. The name of the
University may not be used to endorse or promote products derived
from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

@(#)rxformat.8 6.4 (Berkeley) 01/05/90

C 5 rxformat - format floppy disks rxformat [ -d ] special The rxformat program formats a diskette in the specified drive associated with the special device special . ( Special is normally /dev/rx0, for drive 0, or /dev/rx1, for drive 1.) By default, the diskette is formatted single density; a -d flag may be supplied to force double density formatting. Single density is compatible with the IBM 3740 standard (128 bytes/sector). In double density, each sector contains 256 bytes of data.

Before formatting a diskette rxformat prompts for verification if standard input is a tty (this allows a user to cleanly abort the operation; note that formatting a diskette will destroy any existing data). Formatting is done by the hardware. All sectors are zero-filled.

`No such device' means that the drive is not ready, usually because no disk is in the drive or the drive door is open. Other error messages are selfexplanatory. /dev/rx? rx(4) Helge Skrivervik A floppy may not be formatted if the header info on sector 1, track 0 has been damaged. Hence, it is not possible to format a completely degaussed disk. (This is actually a problem in the hardware.)