5 Mar
2005
5 Mar
'05
6:42 p.m.
Sellam wrote about 8-inch drives:
Aren't there supposed to be 26 sectors per track?
That would be the standard format for DD (MFM) 256-byte sectors,
or SD (FM) 128-byte sectors. But if you set the PC BIOS to
believe it is a 5.25" HD disk, it should think it's PC 1.2M format,
15 sectors of 512 bytes. It will also think that there are 80
tracks/side, while the drive only supports 77, so it's not surprising
that there were problems on the last tracks.
It never would have occurred to me that you'd try to use MS-DOS
to format 8-inch disks. I thought you were just trying to read
disks.
Anyhow, older versions of MS-DOS allowed you to tell FORMAT
how many tracks to use, though I'm not sure it was actually
willing to accept arbitrary values. And I'm not sure what
DOS 6.22 allows.
Eric