Hardware Considerations

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

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 platform cannot be used for UFS on an x86 platform, nor can a diskette formatted on an x86 platform be used on a SPARC platform. This is because the SPARC and x86 UFS formats are different. SPARC uses little-endian bit coding, x86 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. See "Formatting Diskettes Task Map".

On a Solaris system (either SPARC or x86), you can format diskettes of seven different densities (provided you have the appropriate drive).

By default, the diskette drive formats a diskette to a like density. In other words, 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. You can tell a 1.44 Mbyte drive to format a diskette to, for instance, 720 Kbytes. You cannot, however, instruct a 720 Kbyte drive to format a diskette to 1.44 Mbyte. In other words, a diskette can be formatted to its capacity or lower, and a drive can format to its capacity or lower.

To instruct a drive to format a diskette to a non-default density, use the fdformat command as instructed in the following tasks, but use the appropriate density option from Table 13-3, below.

To view all the options to the fdformat command, either see fdformat(1) or enter fdformat -z. The -z option displays all the options to the command.

If you don't know the default density of your drive, begin the formatting process with the default setting (that is, no density options) and observe the configuration message. It will look something like this:

Formatting 1.44 M in /vol/dev/rdiskette0/unformatted
Press return to start formatting floppy.

The confirmation message indicates the drive's default density. For instance, in the example above, the default density of the drive is 1.44 Mbytes. If the density is not what you expected, use Control-c to escape the formatting process and start over.