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In computing, format is a command-line utility that carries out disk formatting. It is a component of various operating systems , including 86-DOS , MS-DOS , IBM PC DOS and OS/2 , Microsoft Windows and ReactOS .
A block, a contiguous number of bytes, is the minimum unit of storage that is read from and written to a disk by a disk driver.The earliest disk drives had fixed block sizes (e.g. the IBM 350 disk storage unit (of the late 1950s) block size was 100 six-bit characters) but starting with the 1301 [8] IBM marketed subsystems that featured variable block sizes: a particular track could have blocks ...
The command redirects requests for disk operations on one drive to a different drive. It can also display drive assignments or reset all drive letters to their original assignments. The command is available in MS-DOS versions 3 through 5 and IBM PC DOS releases 2 through 5. [1]
Microsoft released a version of cmd.exe for Windows 9x and ME called WIN95CMD to allow users of older versions of Windows to use certain cmd.exe-style batch files. As of Windows 8, cmd.exe is the normal command interpreter for batch files; the older COMMAND.COM can be run as well in 32-bit versions of Windows able to run 16-bit programs.
Commercially, very little software was ever released on either 1581 disk format or CMD's native format. However, enthusiasts could use this drive to transfer data between typical PC MS-DOS and the Commodore with special software, such as SOGWAP's Big Blue Reader. There was one other 3.5″ floppy drive available for the Commodore 64.
Drive letters are not the only way of accessing different volumes. DOS offers a JOIN command that allows access to an assigned volume through an arbitrary directory, similar to the Unix mount command. It also offers a SUBST command which allows the assignment of a drive letter to a directory.
Drive: This command-line argument specifies the drive letter of the disk for which to display the volume label and serial number. Note: On Windows, the volume serial number is displayed only for disks formatted with MS-DOS version 4.0 or later. OS/2 allows the user to specify more than one drive. The vol command displays the volume labels ...
convert is an external command first introduced with Windows 2000. [2] If the drive cannot be locked (for example, the drive is the system volume or the current drive) the command gives the option to convert the drive the next time the computer is restarted.