Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
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%sccs.include.redist.man%

@(#)rxformat.8 6.5 (Berkeley) 06/24/90

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.)