Re: Formating in direct mode

[Pim Blokland <pDOTblokland@spcgroup.nl>]

Supertimer wrote:
> 
> skibumoh@aol.com (SkibumOh) wrote:
> 
> >Can you format a disk in direct mode??? If so how???
> 
> You mean without loading an operating system (like the C64 can)?
> No.

Well... if he has a 3.5" drive controller, it might be another matter.
Those controllers have so many low-level routines built into their ROMs,
that I think a very tiny machine language program (<100 bytes) would be
enough to format a disk. Something as small as that would be easy to
type in using the Monitor.
However, once you have done that, there would be no way of USING the
disk, because it hasn't been made bootable, of course. You have to start
up from a bootable disk in order to use this one, so there's no reason
to not start up from a bootable disk prior to formatting a blank one.
-- 
Pim Blokland
if replying by e-mail, replace the DOT in my name with a dot.