FORMAT floppy: Drive_IO error (longish)

[Mike McCarty <Mike.McCarty@sbcglobal.net>]

I have a floppy which I knew in advance had errors on it, but
just for the sake of trying out all the tools, and also to see
what got put on the disc by FreeDOS, I tried to format it.
The format ran for quite a long time, like tens of minutes, then
there was what appeared to be an internal error of some sort.

It is the fact that an internal error seemed to occur that
concerns me. Also I am somewhat concerned that one more bad
sector was reported in the total than in the detailled list,
though much less so. Mostly, the latter is likely just a
mis-count, but it might be related to the failure.

Here is the information I collected. Is there more information
I should collect, and where should I send it (if not here)?

I was running xdosemu under Fedora Core 2, the floppy
was *not* mounted under Linux. This is a 2.7 GHz Celeron
single processor Compaq Presario machine with 256MB RAM.

$ uname -a
Linux Presario-1 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 #1 Mon Mar 28 00:50:14 EST 2005 i686 
i686 i386 GNU/Linux

In the emulator...

C:\JMCCARTY>format/u a:
(many errors reported here)
...
Sector 2880 CHS=[79:1:18] bad
100 percent completed.
Found 88 bad sectors during formatting.
  Preparing FAT area...
100 percent completed.
Drive_IO( command=WRITE sector=24 count=1 ) [FAT12/16] [drive A:]
 

  Critical error encountered while using DOS disk driver
  DOS driver error (hex): 03
    Description: unknown command given to driver
  Program terminated.
 

C:\JMCCARTY>ver /r
 

FreeCom version 0.82 pl 3 XMS_Swap [Mar 06 2004 10:49:37]
DOS version 7.10
FreeDOS kernel version 1.1.35
 

C:\JMCCARTY>format/?
FreeDOS Format Version 0.91p
Written by Brian E. Reifsnyder (and several contributors).
Copyright 1999 - 2004 under the terms of the GNU GPL, Version 2.
...
C:\JMCCARTY>_

Here is the complete list of sectors reported...

[ 2:0: 1] through [ 2:0: 8] inclusive
[ 8:0: 1] through [ 8:0: 8] inclusive
[78:0: 1] through [78:0:17] inclusive
[78:1: 1] through [78:1:18] inclusive
[79:0: 1] through [79:0:18] inclusive
[79:1: 1] through [79:1:18] inclusive

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
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I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
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