On Fri, 25 May 2001, Peter Hardy wrote:
> Yes, cramming a little more space onto a floppy would have been great. But,
> well, Microsoft didn't tell anybody else how to do it. I don't see why
> Microsoft's install media should be the only benefit of the technology.
> My Year 11 qbasic assignment stretched to just over 1 floppy, and for this
> reason, I now officially hate Microsoft.
As much as I hate to say this - Miscosoft didn't do anything to hide
the ability to put more onto a floppy than the rated 1.44 meg. They simply
didn't provide the _tools_ to do it as a standard option for MS-DOS.
I can look onto my BBS shareware drive and find probably 4 or 5 utilities
which will allow you to format a floppy into exactly this size - or more -
depending on how far down you wanted to take the directory size limit on
the disk.
The method is basically simple - simply reduce the size of the "reserved"
directory table space for the root of the disk from its default 255
entries to as low as 1 entry. This makes a smaller DET, and makes more
space available for file use.
For image files/single file use, it's perfect - hell, I had a backup
program which did it by default - to make the number of floppies needed to
backup your HD lower.
This one can;t reasonably be blamed on M$ - as much as I hate to say it.
:-)
DaZZa
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