Formatting a Zip disk on Athena
As of Athena 9.2, Zip drives are being phased out. While support for
existing Zip drives will continue for the short term, broken zip
drives will not be replaced. For storage of large files, we recommend
using recordable compact discs. For more information, see our stock
answer "Making CD-R and CD-RW discs on Athena" in the "Workstations"
category.
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You can format a Zip disk in DOS format on Athena. To do so, you
may need to partition the Zip disk first. You'll need to run these
commands as root.
You should use a zip disk as one of x:, y: or z: or else you may
get overlapping partitions.
1 To format a 100mb disk with 4 partitions:
athena% mpartition -c -t 96 -h 64 -s 32 -b 32 z:
athena% mformat z:
To format a 250mb disk with 4 partitions:
athena% mpartition -c -t 239 -h 64 -s 32 -b 32 z:
athena% mformat z:
2 To format a 100mb disk with one partition:
athena% mpartition -c -t 96 -h 64 -s 32 -b 32 x:
athena% mformat x:
To format a 250mb disk with one partition:
athena% mpartition -c -t 239 -h 64 -s 32 -b 32 x:
athena% mformat x:
3 To format a 100mb disk with no partitions:
athena% mformat -t 96 -h 64 -s 32 y:
To format a 250mb disk with no partitions:
athena% mformat -t 239 -h 64 -s 32 y:
(You don't need to partition it, but you do need to
specify the geometries since it can't use the partition info
to determine this)
When partitioning, you may need to run the mpartition command with the
-I flag if you get errors like this:
Boot signature not set
Use the -I flag to initialize the partition table, and set the boot signature
inconsistency detected!
Retry with the -f switch to go ahead anyways
Exit 1
This is using the default mtools locker setup which has
z: as the zip disk entry with 4 partitions, x: as the entry with
1 partition, and y: as the entry with no partitions.
To remove a partition that has been created:
athena% mpartition -r z:
Once you have formatted a zip disk, you are usually able to remove
the partition and restore it without destroying the contents of the disk.
You can find out info about a partition via :
athena% mpartition -p -v z:
196608 sectors in total
sectors: 32 heads: 64
*Partition 4
active=80
start: h=1 s=1 c=0
type=0x6
end: h=63 s=32 c=95
start=32
nr=196576
The following command will recreate the partition for drive Z:
mpartition -c -t 96 -h 64 -s 32 -b 32 Z:
The last part of this can be useful if you want to format a new disk in
the same manner as an existing disk. You can find which drive name to
use by trying mdir x:, mdir y: and mdir z: on the existing disk until
you get one that works. Once you have one that works, you can run the
above command on that drive and use the returned mpartition line to
partition the new disk and then run the mformat command to format the
disk as mentioned above. (unless the working drive is y:, in which case
you just run the format command).
You should also be able to format a Zip disk similarly to the
Unix hard drive on the machine. To do so you would generally use the
format program and the newfs program on the machine. The details of
doing this will vary depending on what machine you are doing this on.
(last updated Aug 21 1997)
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