22 Oct
2007
22 Oct
'07
11:12 a.m.
In a pinch, one can declare a 360K 5.25" drive on system as a 720K or
1.44M drive for the purposes of reading floppies. If you try to
format a floppy using M$ utilities, you'll slam into the position
stop somewhere around 42 cylinders in--repeatedly. Disk change
detection will, of course, not work, but that may not be an issue
with your application.
5.25" DSHD drives can be used to read HD floppies by declaring them
as 1.44MB 3.5" drives. The data rate's the same--the drive just
spins faster. DD disks however, will not be read because of the
speed difference (5.25" DD disks in an HD drive employ a 300K data
rate, rather than the 250K used by 3.5" DD disks).
Cheers,
Chuck