NFORMAT! tool, that I mentioned earlier here

aVd wrote on 2026-06-20, 05:31:

NFORMAT! - this tool helped me to save a tons of "damaged" floppy diskettes with magnetically "bad sectors".

has all the settings needed for floppy disks "overburning" and formatting in non-standard formats:

It has a super simple and fast TUI interface and it does its job perfectly fine. The only drawback - it comes without build-in standard DOS format profiles for 5.25" diskette drives, but this could be easily corrected by adding user profiles with all the settings needed.

Nformat was great along with DaveDDS Imagedisk utility of course. Nformat was easiest to use and it allowed great modifications to all the lax, standard values to increase capacity.

But there were also a couple more oddballs like 188.exe which claimed to be able to format a 1.44 floppy to 1.88M. I never got it to work. And there was the Microsoft DMF standard which put 1.68M on a 1.44M floppy using 21 sectors per track. I remember Win 95 was shipped on DMF 1.68M floppies.

And the author of 2M, Ciriaco García de Celis, with whom I communicated fondly with back in the 1993-95 period, also released a utility called 765debug with the 2M package which allowed one to test floppy drives to very fine detail and standards of precision.

zyzzle wrote on 2026-07-07, 01:38:

And the author of 2M, Ciriaco García de Celis, with whom I communicated fondly with back in the 1993-95 period, also released a utility called 765debug with the 2M package which allowed one to test floppy drives to very fine detail and standards of precision.

interesting I will have to look for this.

winimage could do some weird high capacity formats. but it's a windows app, obviously.

zyzzle wrote on 2026-07-07, 01:38:

Nformat was great along with DaveDDS Imagedisk utility of course. Nformat was easiest to use and it allowed great modifications to all the lax, standard values to increase capacity.

But there were also a couple more oddballs like 188.exe which claimed to be able to format a 1.44 floppy to 1.88M. I never got it to work. And there was the Microsoft DMF standard which put 1.68M on a 1.44M floppy using 21 sectors per track. I remember Win 95 was shipped on DMF 1.68M floppies.

And the author of 2M, Ciriaco García de Celis, with whom I communicated fondly with back in the 1993-95 period, also released a utility called 765debug with the 2M package which allowed one to test floppy drives to very fine detail and standards of precision.

Hi, @zyzzle,
This m$ DMF format can be easily created with tools like NFORMAT! or ImageDisk (IMD) and WinImage also supports it. DMF main format parameters can be found in wikipedia article and also here: https://winimage.com/wimushlp/wini1a1y.htm

I found 765DEBUG version 5.0 and its source code here: http://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/drivers/Central%2 … bleuge/765debug

Thanks for mentioning this tool.

It will be even nicer, if download links or URLs are given, when something not so popular is suggested.

aVd wrote on 2026-07-08, 04:29:

I found 765DEBUG version 5.0 and its source code here: http://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/drivers/Central%2 … bleuge/765debug

Thanks for mentioning this tool.

It will be even nicer, if download links or URLs are given, when something not so popular is suggested.

Thanks for your link to the newest version of 765debug. I still had the old ver. 4.0 included with 2MF, didn't even know a 5.0 had been released, so thanks for that and even the source code. (I almost posted the v 4.0 for reference to my post, but it's now obsolete with your find).

kingcake wrote on 2026-07-06, 03:31:

Pretty solid list. I'll mod it a bit: […]
Show full quote

OzzFan wrote on 2026-07-03, 02:46:

My favorite DOS utilities are: […]
Show full quote

My favorite DOS utilities are:

Debug (MS/PC DOS)
SpinRite (GRC)
Speedisk (Norton Utlities)
Speedsys
Quarterdeck Manifest
PKzip
Undelete/Erase Protect (Central Point Tools / Norton Utilities)

Pretty solid list. I'll mod it a bit:

Debug (MS/PC DOS)
SpinRite 6.1 R4 (GRC)
Quarterdeck QEMM (Manifest comes with it)
IDEinfo (shows correct CHS for connected IDE drives even if bios is not set right/at all)
cachechk
IMD (good for testing/cleaning/aligning floppy drives and basic imaging)
ctmouse (my go to universal mouse driver for dos)
nansi.sys (ansi text speed boos + uses less memory)
videcdd.sys (my go to universal ide cd rom driver for dos)
mtcp
chkcpu
pro com plus

You bring up a couple other good ones that I forgot to mention: cachechk and chkcpu.

yeah... XTree Gold

Thanks for all your suggestions.

I've added a few more to the first post:

DEVLOAD (load drivers from command line)
http://cd.textfiles.com/somuch/smmodem/UTILS/DEVLOD18.ZIP (older version, seems to work better than newer one)

MicroWeb DOS web browser (web browser for 8088; can't do HTTPS)
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb

V (text file viewer)
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/file/28642/V … /view/v26tk.lzh

Xpdf (utilities to extract images and text from PDF files)
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/fr … df/xpdf303b.zip

"ZDir" was mentioned here: Re: What are your favourite DOS utilities?

But which one? I know of two different ZDIR DOS utilities:

ZDir - directory lister by Chris Kirmse.

ZDIR - list/touch (update timestamp) files within .zip by our fellow forum member Dave Dunfield (@DaveDDS).

aVd wrote on Today, 08:09:

"ZDir" was mentioned here: Re: What are your favourite DOS utilities? […]
Show full quote

"ZDir" was mentioned here: Re: What are your favourite DOS utilities?

But which one? I know of two different ZDIR DOS utilities:

ZDir - directory lister by Chris Kirmse.

ZDIR - list/touch (update timestamp) files within .zip by our fellow forum member Dave Dunfield (@DaveDDS).

I think it should be the first one.

I have added two more utilities to first post:

XMSDSK (RAMdisk that can be resized and unloaded; includes SETXMSTO to use > 64 MB of RAM in MS-DOS 6.22)
https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/mirror/simtel.net/p … sk/furd19_i.zip

NoteTaker (TSR with popup window to write notes; text mode only)
https://archive.org/download/SharewareCdrom19 … 1A%2FNTAKER.ZIP

aVd wrote on Today, 08:09:

... ZDIR - list/touch (update timestamp) files within .zip by our fellow forum member Dave Dunfield (@DaveDDS).

I doubt many people know about (or would use) my ZDIR ... it came into existence purely because I historically like to set the TIMEstamp of my packages I distribute to the version number of that package (eg: Micre-C/PC v3.23 - the files are have times: 03:23a) - and doing more and more under DosBox these days, DosBox does not support INT 21h AX=5701h (touch)

So I researched .ZIP format and created a tool to be able to "patch" .ZIPs to have timestamps I wanted on certain files - while I was at it, I made it do some things I thought "nice" to easily list the content of a .ZIP:

1ZipDIRectory
2
3use:    ZDIR zipfile[.ZIP] [pattern][=[yr-mo-dy]-[hr:mi:se]]... [options]
4
5Opts:   -B           Bare (no times/sizes shown)
6        -C           show Compressed size
7        -D           don't show main Directory entries
8        -F           show individual File entries
9        -N           show Names only (no path)
10        -Ofile[.ZIP] set Output file            (only if)    [%TEMP%_ZDIR_.ZIP]
11        -R           don't Replace original ZIP ( =yr...)       (keep ^^)
12        -S           show Summary
13        -P[n]        Page [24]lines (press SPACE to proceed, ESC to exit)
14        -W[col]]     Wide (bare in columns [13])
15        -Q           Quiet (no output)
16Displays the content of a .ZIP in {directory format}
17  pattern = file match pattern (may contain '*','?'):   *=All  *.*=MustHave'.'
18shows original DOS timestamps (Windows tries to adjust for DST)
19
20If =yr-mo-dy-hr:mi:se  those values in pattern-file timestamps will be changed
21(TOUCHed)   * =skip but don't change.     If first seperator is ':', only time
22is changed (not date).   Some OSs (Windows) don't accept = (use "pattern=...")

But ... speaking of DIR listing tools, the one I use all the time is XDIR:

1use:    XDIR [filespec] [options]
2
3opts:   /2              24 hour time
4        /A[+-]adehrs    File must have Attributes           ('e' =accept Every)
5        /B              Bare format
6        /C              Compact format                      (default with /O)
7        /E              show sEconds
8        /F              Files only (no dirs) in list        (default with /SCB)
9        /L              use Lower case
10        /M              show Memory use
11        /N              No commas
12        /S              list Subdirs
13        /T              directories Trail filenames
14        /U              no sUmmary
15        /W              Wide format
16        /O[-!]o         list in Order                       ('-' = reverse)
17            o:  'D'ate, 'E'xtension, 'N'ame, 'S'ize         (/C unless '!')
18
19Wildcards work like they do in UNIX, ie: '.' has so special meaning:
20    use '*' for ALL files, '*.*' means name must contain '.'
21
22Dave Dunfield - 2026/2/8

No fancy colors etc. just a simple compact output:

1> XDIR/sc R:\TST
226-01-01  3:04a           64 R:\TST\D1\A1.TXT
326-05-01  4:02a          128 R:\TST\D1\A2.TXT
426-08-03  6:16a          192 R:\TST\D2\B1.TXT
526-01-02  3:04a          256 R:\TST\D2\B2.TXT
6Total:       4 Files(s)           640 bytes.

It's not obvious from the above description, but /O(rder) works "globally" on ALL files in the listing (most DIRs can only /Order within single directory):

1> XDIR/scod R:\TST
226-01-01  3:04a           64 R:\TST\D1\A1.TXT
326-01-02  3:04a          256 R:\TST\D2\B2.TXT
426-05-01  4:02a          128 R:\TST\D1\A2.TXT
526-08-03  6:16a          192 R:\TST\D2\B1.TXT
6Total:       4 Files(s)           640 bytes.

What's the last .C file I was working on in this tree? XDIR/scod *.C
What's the oldest .H ""? XDIR/sco-d *.H
What's the biggest file in this tree? XDIR/scos
What's the smallest ""? XDIR/sco-s