path: root/sysutils/sformat/pkg-descr



The main advantages to the Sun format utility are:
- Working surface analyze that will detect defective blocks that are going
  to get bad.
- Analyzing program that detects defective bearings in the disk (-randrw).
- Will repair nearly any defective disk, that has no firmware bug or electric
  defect.
- Allows to clear the grown defect list if a disk.
- Disk geometry and label geometry are separated.
- Allows cheating in the label geometry to deal with the problems with the
  limitation to 16 bit data types in the Sun disk label.
- Large database of disks including firmware specials.
- You need no desk calculator to generate a partition table.
  Shorthands for:
  - MBytes
  - cylinders/head/sectors
  - size partition to end on end of disk
  - partition following another partition
  - partition ending before another partition
  - shifting partition on the disk (allows growing part 0 and shrinking part 1)
- Partition consistency checker with (ascii) graphical display.
- Mode page interpreter allows to set easily all mode pages you will ever find
  in a manual, sformat needs not to know about them.

NOTE:	Sformat has its full functionality on SunOS/Solaris on sparc
	and Motorola systems, on all other systems sformat will create
	Sun disk labels with wrong byte-order, but formatting/analysis/
	repair will work.
The main advantages to the Sun format utility are:
- Working surface analyze that will detect defective blocks that are going
  to get bad.
- Analyzing program that detects defective bearings in the disk (-randrw).
- Will repair nearly any defective disk, that has no firmware bug or electric
  defect.
- Allows to clear the grown defect list if a disk.
- Disk geometry and label geometry are separated.
- Allows cheating in the label geometry to deal with the problems with the
  limitation to 16 bit data types in the Sun disk label.
- Large database of disks including firmware specials.
- You need no desk calculator to generate a partition table.
  Shorthands for:
  - MBytes
  - cylinders/head/sectors
  - size partition to end on end of disk
  - partition following another partition
  - partition ending before another partition
  - shifting partition on the disk (allows growing part 0 and shrinking part 1)
- Partition consistency checker with (ascii) graphical display.
- Mode page interpreter allows to set easily all mode pages you will ever find
  in a manual, sformat needs not to know about them.

NOTE:	Sformat has its full functionality on SunOS/Solaris on sparc
	and Motorola systems, on all other systems sformat will create
	Sun disk labels with wrong byte-order, but formatting/analysis/
	repair will work.