A real common question I get is how to automate the formatting 
of a disk. Half of these questions are from industry people 
who are trying to maintain their sanity. The other half are 
from wannabe junior hackers who think they know someone lame 
enough to fall for a batch attack. By making you read 
instructions on how to solve the problem rather than solving 
it for you, I hope to separate the two classes. And teach you 
the general approach on solving similar problems.

What you do is bring up a DOS window and open up NOTEPAD too. 
Type your FORMAT command into the DOS window. Your command 
might be: 

FORMAT A: /U

followed by the "Enter" key. Okay. Now start paying attention 
to every time your fingers touch the keyboard! The FORMAT 
command may ask you to enter something. No matter what you 
type into the DOS box to make FORMAT happy, switch to the 
NOTEPAD window and type THE EXACT SAME THING. Every keystroke 
the same. Hit the "Enter" key in NOTEPAD too, just like you 
do in the DOS window. 

When you get done, save what you have in NOTEPAD. Use any 
name you want. Suppose you saved the NOTEPAD stuff as 
"automatic.txt" in the same directory as your batch file 
(or in the same directory as your prompt in your DOS window). 
You could automate FORMAT like this (remember you need to 
use the exact same FORMAT command with the exact same 
options you originally used): 

FORMAT A: /U < automatic.txt 

That's all there is to it. You just add the "< automatic.txt" 
to the end of the command line and it will automatically type 
all the keystrokes you saved into your command. But be sure 
to test every possibility! What if the disk is empty or 
write-protected or the wrong type? Do you get asked a different 
set of answers? If so, then the automatic thing you made won't 
work. 

And then after I thought I knew it all, Martin Edwards told me 
about an undocumented option on the FORMAT command: /autotest
Use it like this:
format a: /autotest
I haven't tried it myself just yet, but it sounds right! So
I looked in the format command for more... And found these
other undocumented options too:
/select
/backup
Beats me what they do. I haven't tried them on test floppies
yet. Feel adventurous?