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The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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     This operation is sometimes called a "low-level format" and
     prepares the disk for physical read/write operations at the sector
     level. The drive must be subsequently partitioned with the FDISK
     command and then given a "high-level format" with the FORMAT
     command to install a file system.
 
     If bit 4 of register CL is set, Int 15h is called with AH = 0Fh
     and AL = phase code after each cylinder is formatted or analyzed.
     The phase code is defined as follows: 0 = Reserved, 1 = Surface
     analysis, 2 = Formatting.
 
     If bit 2 of register CL is set, the drive's secondary defect map
     is updated to reflect errors found during surface analysis. If
     both bit 2 and bit 1 are set, the secondary defect map is
     replaced.
 
     For an extended surface analysis, the disk should first be
     formatted by calling this function with bit 3 cleared and then
     analyzed by calling this function with bit 3 set.
                                    -♦-