Hi Eric,
1M is a pretty standard size for floppies. I have a box or two of these
myself. The proper appellation would be "double density" (as opposed to
"high density", which are twice as big). The only visual hint is that DD
floppies have only one hole (the "read-only" window), while HD floppies
have two ("read-only" window + HD capacity hole).
DD floppies are 1M raw, 720K formatted in size. They are very common on
pre-386 machines. FreeDOS supports them without any troubles, although I
had to instruct FORMAT with a specific switch to format them correctly
(FORMAT /F:720 A:) - but this might be because I used a drive that was
1.44 capable to format them. Maybe on a native 720K drive this would not
be required.
Also, I heard that if such DD disk is formatted as 1.44M, it will likely
will very unreliably, and reformatting it to 720K won't fix it, so it's
basically good for trash (but I have never experienced this myself, I
always format my floppies according to their specs).
Mateusz
On 17/11/2015 14:32, Eric Auer wrote:
>
> Hi Jayden,
>
> (please use SPACES after punctuation - I added them below already...)
>> Question about the way our new kernel will handle floppy disks. I recently
>
> Probably not a kernel issue and also, which "new kernel" do you mean?
>
>> got my hands on a lot of unopened micro floppy disks, with a 1 MB storage
>
> That is an unusual size for a floppy, I would say. How many inch?
>
>> capacity. When I ran FORMAT on one in FreeDOS, it threw an error. It couldn't
>> be formatted with FAT, due to a "Bad track" and some other things. I am aware
>
> Are you sure that your BIOS supports that size of floppy?
>
>> that MICRODISKS are older than FLOPPYDISKS (Althought the difference
>> visually is almost none). Is there a way to use microdisks on
>
> So basically they might have been too old to be still working ;-)
>
>> FreeDOS/Windows? They are listed with a RAW filesystem on both Windows
>> and FreeDOS. Does our kernel support these types of disks?
>
> The kernel does not really care, you have to ask your BIOS
> (modern BIOS may support only 1.44 MB) and the FORMAT tool.
>
> Maybe you can find an old DOS FORMAT tool which still knows
> what "micro" floppy disk are? Which capacity should those
> have? How many tracks? How many sectors per track? One side
> or both sides? How many bytes per sectro? What other specs?
>
> Cheers, Eric
>
> PS: I think it is good to have multiple memory managers as
> AVAILABLE drivers in FreeDOS 1.2, but I would install only
> one (set) of them active in config sys. For example HIMEMX
> with some boot option to also load JEMM386.
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
