Fdformat is the name of two unrelated programs:
* A command-line tool for
Linux that "
low-level formats" a floppy disk.
* A
DOS tool written in
Pascal
Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name
* Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name
** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...
by Christoph H. Hochstätter that allows users to
format floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
s to a higher than usual density, enabling the user to store up to 300
kilobytes more data on a normal high density 3.5" floppy disk. It also increases the speed of diskette I/O on these specially formatted disks using a technique called "Sector Sliding". In this technique, the physical sectors on the disk are ordered in such a way that when the drive advances to the next track, the next logical sector waiting to be read is immediately available to the read head.
See also
*
2M, a similar program that offers even higher capacity
*
DMF, a high-density diskette format used by Microsoft
*
VGA-Copy, a similar program that allowed higher floppy disk capacity
*
XDF, a high-density diskette format used by IBM
External links
FTP for the DOS tool, version 1.8, compiled .exe and Pascal sources
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Floppy disk computer storage
Linux file system-related software