disk format question

[Roger K. Wells]

On 01/08/2013 10:14 AM, Warren Young wrote:
> On 1/8/2013 06:59, bartels wrote:
>>
>> The windows format.com
>
> format.com hasn't existed since the DOS days.  That includes the 
> DOS-based versions of Windows, up through Windows ME.  Under 
> NT-derived versions of Windows, "format" is a built-in command in 
> cmd.exe.
FWIW in Windows 7:

objdump -p c:/Windows/System32/format.com

c:/Windows/System32/format.com:     file format pei-i386

Characteristics 0x102
         executable
         32 bit words

Time/Date               Tue Jul 14 00:15:15 2009
Magic                   010b    (PE32)

I don't know if that changes anything here though.

Roger Wells
>
> > claims the fs is write protected, but I hope dd
>> can help out.
>
> It's worth a try, but if I had to take a blind bet on it, I'd say 
> you're going to find that dd will give the same result.  Cygwin is 
> essentially a user-level process.  If cmd.exe cannot do a thing, 
> dd.exe probably can't, either.
>
> It is *possible* that unmounting the filesystem with the 
> task/c/Windows/System32/format.combar button will let you write to the 
> raw device.  But Windows being Windows, it's possible that will make 
> it disappear from the system entirely, too.
>
>> The mtab is not very helpful:
>
> That's because Cygwin proper does not mount local filesystems. The 
> Cygwin mount table just shows you Cygwin-specific mappings that it has 
> added on top of what the underlying NT kernel has done.
>
> In this case...
>
>>   D: /cygdrive/d udf binary,posix=0,user,noumount,auto 1 1
>
> ...it is showing you the /cygdrive/d alias Cygwin has provided for you.
>
>> My question is this: which device in /dev do I use?
>
> According to [this][1] it's probably /dev/sdb.  But please do read 
> through what I pointed you to first, and check its applicability 
> carefully before attempting this.
>
> [1] 
> http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html#pathnames-posixdevices
>
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-- 
Roger Wells, P.E.
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