The main advantages to the Sun format utility are: - Working surface analyze that will detect defective blocks that are going to get bad. - Analyzing program that detects defective bearings in the disk (-randrw). - Will repair nearly any defective disk, that has no firmware bug or electric defect. - Allows to clear the grown defect list if a disk. - Disk geometry and label geometry are separated. - Allows cheating in the label geometry to deal with the problems with the limitation to 16 bit data types in the Sun disk label. - Large database of disks including firmware specials. - You need no desk calculator to generate a partition table. Shorthands for: - MBytes - cylinders/head/sectors - size partition to end on end of disk - partition following another partition - partition ending before another partition - shifting partition on the disk (allows growing part 0 and shrinking part 1) - Partition consistency checker with (ascii) graphical display. - Mode page interpreter allows to set easily all mode pages you will ever find in a manual, sformat needs not to know about them. NOTE: Sformat has its full functionality on SunOS/Solaris on sparc and Motorola systems, on all other systems sformat will create Sun disk labels with wrong byte-order, but formatting/analysis/ repair will work.