Formatting A Disk-The Header Command - Commodore 128 System Manual

device number— a preassigned number for a peripheral
Formatting a Disk—The HEADER Command
To store programs on a new (or blank) disk, you must first
prepare the disk to receive data. This is called " formatting" the
disk. NOTE: Make sure you turn on the disk drive before inserting
any disk.
The formatting process divides the disk into sections called
tracks and sectors. A table of contents, called a directory, is
created. Each time you store a program on disk, the name you
assign to that program will be added to the directory.
The Commodore 128 has two kinds of formatting commands.
One can be used only in C128 mode, and one can be used in
both C64 and C128 mode. The following paragraphs describe
C128 mode format commands here. See Chapter III on C64
mode for more information about C64 programming and disk
handling.
The command that formats a diskette is called the HEADER
command. It has a long form and a short form. To format a blank
(new) disk, you MUST use the long form as follows:
HEADER "diskname" ,li.d.[,Ddrive number] [,[ON]U device
number]
After the word HEADER, you type a name of your choice for the
disk, within quotes. You can choose any name with up to 16
characters. You should choose disk names that help you identify
what will be stored on the disk.
Follow the diskname with a comma and the letter " I" . Now a two
character i.d., followed by a comma. Your disk i d. does not have
to be numbers; you can also choose letters. You may want to
develop a consecutive coding system for your disks, such as A1,
A2, B1, B2.
If you have one single disk drive, just press RETURN at this point
since the Commodore 128 automatically assumes the drive
number is 0 and the device number is 8. You can specify these
parameters if you have more than one drive or a dual drive.
device. For example, the device number
for a Commodore disk drive is 8.
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