Working with DOS

Formatting a DOS floppy

DOS partitions on your hard disk cannot be formatted using the procedures described in this section. To do this, you must either use the native DOS format command, or have root user privilege (see ``Using other operating systems with an SCO OpenServer system'' for details).

Although you cannot format a hard disk, you can format a DOS floppy disk using the dosformat command (see doscmd(C) for details), as follows:

dosformat drive

For example, to format a floppy in the A: drive, type the following command:

   $ dosformat /dev/fd0

Note that you cannot specify A: (or a:) with dosformat. This is because A: is aliased to /dev/install, which cannot be formatted (see ``DOS devices under the UNIX system''). You should therefore use /dev/fd0, which automatically formats the floppy correctly for the drive type. (You can specify the complete device filename if you wish, for example, /dev/fd096ds15 for a 5¼ inch 1.2MB drive; see ``Identifying device files''.)

Note that unlike the format(C) command, that only works on raw devices (such as /dev/rfd0), dosformat only works on block devices (such as /dev/fd0).

You can format a floppy in the second drive by typing either of the following command lines:

$ dosformat /dev/fd1

$ dosformat /dev/fd196ds15

The latter formats a 5¼ inch 1.2MB drive.