> | No, I haven't used the FE formatter; all I've tried (with very little
> | success) was the "customer formatter."  I was so disgusted with the
> | "customer formatter" that I kept a VS2000 around whose only purpose
> | is to reformat MFM disks.
> 
> The customer thing is utter crap.  I suspect at best it can reformat a
> properly formatted disk.  Otherwise forget it.  It produces no useful
> commentary (I think just "N minutes into the format") although I have

At least it's better than nothing. I've used the customer formatter 
included on the "MVII DIAG CUST TK50" to format an Micropolis 1335 
out of an PC into a RD53. But for sure the VS2000 formatter is much
better, especially if you want to format disks which aren't supported
by the customer formatter, e.g. Seagate ST251 into RD32.

> The FE diagnostics also allow you to do continuous testing on any/all
> devices found.  We found that the RX50 version is also way better than

This feature is also included in the customer diags.