FORMAT by Charles Bogardus, SLKUG, August 1987 (Options on how to format a new disk) Well, the big shipment from M.E.I. finally showed up. 200 fresh platters of magnetic media, just begging to have data placed upon them. I was bordering on ecstacy. Then I realized something. You gotta format those little square things with the hole in the middle. Imagine formatting a box of 10 disks. Imagine doing twenty times that. Sounds like a great way to kill a weekend, huh? I persevered, however, and looked at my local KUG bulletin board for help. To make a long story shorter, or else I may take up too much space on disk, I found a veritable plethora of different programs that can be used to prepare these square frisbee's for receiving all those little keystrokes, and keeping them safe for posterity, or until I decide to erase them and put games on the disks... Well these are the results. The programs varied in features and speed. The fastest formatted in only 48 seconds, and the slowest, and coincidentally the one I had been using, took two minutes and 48 seconds... They vary according to the amount of error handling they do. With the fastest one, I had a bad disk slip past, and then managed to download a couple of libraries onto it. They now are about half mangled, and the disk won't even show a directory. The really bad news is that one of them is a new version, #7, of my favorite printer abuser, ARTIE7. COPY: I think everyone has this one. It'll let you copy, format, blank, image, and who knows what with disks. I just tried out two of the functions: (F)ormat and (B)lank functions. Copy's (F)ormat took 1:05 to format the disk. I don't think there is error verification. Also, it doesn't sysgen either. The (B)lank function took 1:12, but it checked the disk for errors and sysgened it. DUTIL: This came with my Kaypro 1 and is extremely idiot friendly. It also lets you do a bunch of stuff to your disks, but I think COPY was more versatile. COPY was also faster. DUTIL totally flunked the speed test. To format a disk took 1:38. To use the Blank function, which also writes a copy of CP/M to the disk, took 2:58! It verifies the disk, and has proved to be pretty good with error hunting. This is the one I had been using. It is also very easy to use, and requires only one keystroke once you get it ready to rip. MFDISK: This is a popular (read "Free") utility for formatting between different kinds of CP/M disks, and reading files from different formats. It is good for the reading and writing of strange formats, but as far as formatting megaquantities.... It takes forever if you are going to format disks. First you have to tell it you want to format a disk, then you have to move the little bar to the kind of computer you want to format for, and then, finally, you have to pick your kind of computer from the different kinds under your brand name. Takes about 15 seconds added on to the 1:22 that the program took to format a DS/DD disk. Did not sysgen the disk. And, you have to repeat the entire process every time. UNIFORM: This is a popular (read "It Works!") utility for formatting between different formats of CP/M and Mess Dos disks. Great program, and like having a clone just for data transfer. You can't run the Mess Dos programs, but who would want to? It is a lot easier to carry than lugging a 26 pound Kaypro or a Compaq (even heavier!) around. Once you load the program and specify what kind of disk you want to format for, out of several screenfulls, you only have to hit a couple of keys to format disks. It does it in 56 seconds, and seems to work okay with verifying and checking for errors. Did not sysgen the disk. FORMAT: Fast, little (2K) PD formatting program. Easy to load and run, and only requires a bare minimum of keystrokes to be used. This took 48 seconds to format a DS/DD disk. I don't think whoever wrote the program put any kind of extensive error checking stuff in it, because I had one that formatted "okay" and then bombed, after I wrote a file to it. I'm now using the Uniform program for the rest of the disks I need to format. I'm going to be switching to ZCPR3, so I'm not all that attached to the sysgen functions, but it is nice to have a bootable disk. One possible alternative for that would be the COPY program's Image function, where it makes an exact copy of the disk in Drive A.