From: Waldi Ravens <waldi@moacs.indiv.nl.net>
   Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 08:43:46 +0100 (MET-1)

   Mike Long wrote:

   > That doesn't do you any good if the disk was formatted under DOS,
   > though.

   Sorry, I don't see how formatting a disk can have any effect on the
   creation of a file system afterwards (or the partioning in between).
   Please, elaborate.

"Formatting" under MS/DOS (as well as AmigaOS) means "putting the
filesystem onto the disk", that is, what we call newfs'ing. It is
sometimes, but not necessarily connected with low level formatting or
partitioning first. 

What the author wanted to say is that we can't store clean flat
information onto a normal, created-from-MS/DOS, FAT filesystem, as
there would be no space for it.

Remember, we don't want to use FAT filesystems because they are so
sexy (we have FFS, and maybe in the future lfs for that) but because
we sometimes want to share data with MSDOS computers, which might
time-share our disk and cpu, or which wrote a removable medium which
we want to read. So it is normally not very helpful to create a second
reserved block, although it might be possible to make this in a way
that MS-DOS can read the disk afterwards.

Regards,
	Ignatios Souvatzis