.\" Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. .\" All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided .\" that: (1) source distributions retain this entire copyright notice and .\" comment, and (2) distributions including binaries display the following .\" acknowledgement: ``This product includes software developed by the .\" University of California, Berkeley and its contributors'' in the .\" documentation or other materials provided with the distribution and in .\" all advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software. .\" Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may .\" be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without .\" specific prior written permission. .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED .\" WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF .\" MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. .\" .\" @(#)rxformat.8 6.5 (Berkeley) 6/24/90 .\" .TH RXFORMAT 8 "June 24, 1990" .UC 5 .SH NAME rxformat \- format floppy disks .SH SYNOPSIS .B rxformat [ .B \-d ] special .SH DESCRIPTION The .I rxformat program formats a diskette in the specified drive associated with the special device .IR special . ( .I Special is normally /dev/rx0, for drive 0, or /dev/rx1, for drive 1.) By default, the diskette is formatted single density; a .B \-d flag may be supplied to force double density formatting. Single density is compatible with the IBM 3740 standard (128 bytes/sector). In double density, each sector contains 256 bytes of data. .PP Before formatting a diskette .I rxformat prompts for verification if standard input is a tty (this allows a user to cleanly abort the operation; note that formatting a diskette will destroy any existing data). Formatting is done by the hardware. All sectors are zero-filled. .SH DIAGNOSTICS `No such device' means that the drive is not ready, usually because no disk is in the drive or the drive door is open. Other error messages are selfexplanatory. .SH FILES /dev/rx? .SH SEE ALSO rx(4) .SH AUTHOR Helge Skrivervik .SH BUGS A floppy may not be formatted if the header info on sector 1, track 0 has been damaged. Hence, it is not possible to format a completely degaussed disk. (This is actually a problem in the hardware.)