How to get an MS-DOS floppy formatted using HP-UX?
There is no HP-fully-supported way of getting an MS-DOS floppy formatted on HP-UX. (Once you have a PC-compatible floppy, the series of commands referenced in the dosif(4) manpage allow you to read and write the floppies). However, there is a workaround. Perform the basic mediainit with the -f16 switch (this causes the floppy to be formatted with the full 80 tracks, rather than HP’s default safer-but-nonstandard 77+3spare tracks, 512-byte sectors, no sector skew: just like the most basic PC floppies). Then copy on the FAT, directory, label, and other such magic from an honest-to-goodness formatted-on-a-real-PC drive into the first N sectors. For sizes up to 1.44MB floppies, N=20 is more than enough; I don’t have the values for the rarely used 2.88MB size (and I don’t think the drives in the s700 handle that size anyway). This header magic should be copied off an honest-to-goodness PC floppy once with the command dd if=/dev/rfloppy of=/a/good/place/to/store/the/header bs=512 count=20 an
