Solved Will a drive with DOS 6.xx format itself?

ijack September 12, 2017 at 08:55:53

A drive will not format itself. The user has to initiate a format.

Just to add, a drive cannot be formatted while it's in use. So to be able to format C:, you'd have to boot off a floppy or CD to be able to do it. https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-for... message edited by riider

Certainly 😀 But...If the user types format c:, then hits enter and then hits 'Y' will this drive be formatted. ? I hope that this way is good, huh😉

riider, I am almost 100% sure that in DOS < 6.22 the drive will be formatted

ijack September 12, 2017 at 10:21:52

It begins to sound as if you are talking about formatting the drive on which the OS is installed. The only reasons I can think for doing this are malicious. Can you explain in more detail exactly what you want to do, and why.

Yes. Correct. This is 486DX4 PC 16MB RAM, wery well preserved, the hdd is 640MB WD with small amounts of bad sectors. I want to use it as terminal and thermal measurement. Also I will install a tiny linux distro on it. Fdd and cd don't work. So i must use serial rs 232 to download the sw. I will split the hdd to 2 partitions...basically I dont need to format it because the linux will do that on the first partition but I took a bet that MSDOS 6.22 will allow formatting its boot partition. I will do all this next week but today a colleague chalenged me and my memories, claiming that the OS will not allow formatting its partition...I said that up to 6.2 this can happen... thats it.

It's been a long time since I've played with pure DOS so I certainly could be wrong, but I don't think you can format C: from the C:\> prompt. You would need to boot off a bootable DOS floppy (or CD) that contains format.com, then at the A:\> prompt, type format C: & press Enter, then type Y & press Enter to confirm.

I tried easiest way. You can do it too in the future. all answers related to old software very easily can be checked in Oracle Virtual Box. You must simply build your target and select OS. So I build a simple machine with 32MB of RAM 640MB HDD and installed the DOS 6.22 Guess what? After DOS installation and boot from C: I successfully formatted the C drive :-) So you can format C: from C: Thanks. You helped me to think about how to win this bet :-) edited by moderator: removed link

1. In DOS you can format the boot drive (or any drive for that matter that is FAT16). DOS is happy to format itself with C:\FORMAT C:\ It will ask if you want to really do it and if you say yes, it will format the drive. 2. Gogobravo, with no FDD or CD I don't know how you will load the sw via the serial port. You would have to have a terminal program running to open the serial port. 3. I would pull the drive and use a USB hard drive adapter adapter and prepare the drive in Windows computer using Partition Magic 8.0. You will need three partitions - one FAT16 for DOS, one for Linux binaries & data, and one for Linux SWAP. Good luck!