.TH DASDFMT 8 "Tue Jan 25 2000"
.UC 4
.SH NAME
dasdfmt \- formatting of DSAD (ECKD) disk drives.
.SH SYNOPSIS
\fBdasdfmt\fR [-tvyLV] [-b \fIblockSize\fR] [-l \fIdiskLabel\fR] \fIdiskSpec\fR
.SH DESCRIPTION
\fBdasdfmt\fR formats a DASD (ECKD) disk drive to prepare it
for usage with Linux for S/390. \fBWARNING\fR: Incautious usage of
\fBdasdfmt\fR can result in \fBLOSS OF DATA\fR.

.SH OPTIONS
.TP
\fB-t\fR
Disables any modification of the disk drive. \fBdasdfmt\fR just prints
out, what it \fBwould\fR do.

.TP
\fB-v\fR
Increases verbosity.

.TP
\fB-y\fR 
Start formatting without further user-confirmation.

.TP
\fB-L\fR 
Omit the writing of a disk label after formatting.

.TP
\fB-V\fR 
Print version number and exit.

.TP
\fB-b\fR \fIblockSize\fR
Specify blocksize to be used. \fIblocksize\fR must be a positive integer
and always be a power of two. Due due some limitations in the driver,
it is \fBstrongly\fR recommended to use a \fIblockSize\fR of \fI4096\fR.

.TP
\fB-l\fR \fIdiskLabel\fR
Specify the label to be written to disk after formatting. If no label is
specified, a sensible default is used. \fIdiskLabel\fR is interpreted as
ASCII string and is automatically converted to EBCDIC.

.TP
\fIdiskSpec\fR
This parameter specified the device to be formatted. It also can be
given in two variants:
.sp
	\fB-f\fR \fB/dev/dasd\fR\fIX\fR
.br
or
.br
	\fB-n\fR \fIdevnum\fR
.sp
The first form uses the commonly used
.SM UNIX
device notation where \fIX\fR is a single lowercase letter.
The second form uses simply the device number.

.SH BUGS
None so far ;-)

.SH AUTHOR
.nf
This man-page was written by Fritz Elfert <felfert@to.com>
.fi