Re: BlueDisk now available! (was Re: Mystery card!)

[behrenss@muc.de (Soenke Behrens)]

In article <2l4re7$4pl@ausom.ausom.oz.au>,
Peter Watson <paw@ausom.oz.au> wrote:
>sknkwrks@lil-ed.cs.unlv.edu (Scott Alfter) writes:
>>In article <2k5hq4$rs@ionews.io.org> taob@ionews.io.org (Brian Tao) quotes:
>>(<a2.13.23.265@genie.geis.com> J.LANGE7@genie.geis.com writes:)
>>>- MFORMAT (MTools v1.3) won't allow to _change_ the low-level format of
>>>  the current disk. Blank disks aren't formatted as expected. No GS/OS
>>>  formatting dialog is presented before formatting begins.
>No, it's _not_ the same MFormat. The one that Brian and Joachim are referring
>to is the program that is part of my MSDOS Utilities.

Right. And a good job, too, thanks. 

>The original comment is rather worrying - MFormatt will change the low-level
>format of disks on _my_ system! OK, I admit it, I'm using a genuine Apple
>SuperDrive and controller card. But other people seem to be able to use it
>to reformat disks to different densities with Flopticals, TransDrives, etc.

Well ... one, MFormat that has the /S option of course can do it, Joachim
referred to the one that did not have the /S option.

>There may be problems if the BlueDisk returns unusual "format options" which
>MFormat uses as part of the low-level format process. Actually, the format
>options returned by the Apple card are the reason there is no "formatting
>dialogue" before formatting begins. The standard Apple dialogue displays all
>the options, but won't let you select 720K! And I really didn't want to
>rewrite the dialogue!  ;-)


Hmm, I see. Well, IMHO, you should not rely on specific format options
being present or not, let the user chose it. Maybe offer a special
feature for the Apple Disk to support 720k, but also allow to have
a format dialogue appear (passing 0 as the FST will do the trick
nicely). For example, using mformat, I can't format 1.6MB or 2.88MB.
I could easily if there was a format dialogue. So now I first low-level
format and then mformat /q. Works swell.

(Yes, don't worry, I fully intend to pay my shareware fee :)

Yours
Soenke