Purpose:

Badformat is a disk formatting utility that masks out bad tracks, so
that partially defective floppy disks can be used.

Moreover, experiments have shown that bad disks - sometimes, to some
degree - can be "healed" by formatting weak tracks multiple times
over. Badformat supports this with an experimental mode (see below).

This tool targets DD disks chiefly, but it should work with HD disks
as well.

Please do not try to revive disks that make noises when spinning.


Warning: 

Use it at your own risk.
This software is experimental and may be hazardous to your data.
Masking will neither survive defragmentation/reorganization nor
regenerating a disk's invalid bitmap.


Usage:

badformat DRIVE/K/A,NAME/K,OFS/S,FFS/S,HEAL/S

DRIVE/K/A  Drive name, df0:-df3:
NAME/K     Volume name [default "Empty"]
OFS/S      Old filesystem mode [default]
FFS/S      Fast filesystem + international mode
HEAL/S     Healing mode (experimental)

In healing mode, a track is formatted up to twenty times
over with varying bit patterns until a verify succeeds. It
is then formatted and verified with a different set of bit
patterns as many times as it took to succeed initially. If
that fails, the track is given up, and masked.


Examples:

> badformat drive df0:
> badformat drive df0: heal
> badformat drive df0: name hello ffs


Author, website:

tmuellerneoscientists.org
http://neoscientists.org/~bifat/binarydistillery/


Version history:

- 0.2 Warning added.

PERMISSION  UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO METHOD CRC     STAMP     NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ ----------
drwxr-xr-x  2002/2001        0       0 ****** -lhd- 0000 Aug 22 05:35 badformat-0.2/
-rw-rw-r--  2002/2001      867    1651  52.5% -lh5- 9221 Aug 22 09:25 badformat-0.2/README
-rwxr-xr-x  2002/2001     7218   12064  59.8% -lh5- 83e4 Aug 22 05:37 badformat-0.2/badformat
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ ----------
 Total         3 files    8085   13715  59.0%            Aug 22 13:52