Diskette Hardware Considerations

Keep the following in mind when formatting diskettes:

• For information on diskette names, see Table 18–1.

• Diskettes that are not named (that is, they have no “label”) are assigned the default name of noname.

A Solaris system can format diskettes for use on both Solaris and DOS systems. However, the hardware platform imposes some limitations. These limitations are summarized in the following table.

Diskettes formatted for UFS are restricted to the hardware platform on which they were formatted. In other words, a UFS diskette formatted on a SPARC based platform cannot be used for UFS on an IA platform, nor can a diskette formatted on an IA platform be used on a SPARC based platform. This is because the SPARC and IA UFS formats are different. SPARC uses little-endian bit coding, IA uses big-endian.

A complete format for SunOS file systems consists of the basic “bit” formatting plus the structure to support a SunOS file system. A complete format for a DOS file system consists of the basic “bit” formatting plus the structure to support either an MS-DOS or an NEC-DOS file system. The procedures required to prepare a diskette for each type of file system are different. Therefore, before you format a diskette, consider which procedure to follow. For more information, see Formatting Removable Media (Task Map).

On a Solaris system (either SPARC or IA), you can format diskettes with the following densities.

By default, the diskette drive formats a diskette to a like density. This default means that a 1.44 Mbyte drive attempts to format a diskette for 1.44 Mbytes, whether the diskette is in fact a 1.44 Mbyte diskette or not, unless you instruct it otherwise. In other words, a diskette can be formatted to its capacity or lower, and a drive can format to its capacity or lower.