Re: FORMAT floppy: Drive_IO error

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

Bart Oldeman wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>> Alain M. wrote:
>>
>>> Make the test with the latest version. Eric made a lot of Fixes while 
>>> I was making tests. It is much better now, specialy in error conditions.
>>>
>>> But... I made oll tests in real dos...
>>>
>>> http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~eric/stuff/soft/by-others/
>>>
>>> Alain
>>
>>
>> Thanks. I downloaded the latest and tried again. It is very
>> much faster. It also only found 8 bad sectors (hmm...). But
>> the very same IO error occurred.
>>
>> So, where do I need to report the problem?
> 
> 
> DOSEMU. It cannot and has never been able to format floppies, to be 
> precise, BIOS int13/ah=5 is not implemented.

I don't believe so, for a number of reasons.

First, the disc *was* written, and the % completion went up to
100 percent.

Second, the FAT writing was stated to work.

Third, the reported error was a WRITE, not a FORMAT TRACK.

Fourth, I ran the same program on a pure MSDOS 6.0 machine,
under the control of an interrupt capture and analysis
program I wrote several years ago, and verified that
the FORMAT TRACK calls were made during the time that was
reporting % complete. The call which appeared to fail
was indeed a BIOS WRITE.

Fifth, with a disc which was verified to format properly
under MSDOS with the FORMAT.EXE program (latest version)
and with MSDOS FORMAT, the program was capable of formatting
the disc under DOSEMU.

Unfortunately, I was unable to use my interrupt capture
program under DOSEMU, as it always reported not enough
memory to load the program. Apparently, the BORLANDC
link library code for loading/executing a program doesn't
work with DOSEMU for some reason.

Mike
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