Problems reading older disk on newer drive

On Sun, 19 Dec 2004, Bill Girnius wrote: Well sellam's mail said "PC" so I assumed IBM feces type computer. But yes, there were many MSDOS diskette formats before IBM, and even before MSDOS, when it was 86DOS; I think it had the same FAT structure, I just don't recall. presumably after the debacle of CP/M diskette formats) STRONGLY SUGGESTED the use of a table of diskette formats ID's with a particular value of FATid byte. Unsurprisingly the formats were more or less all you could cram on a soft-sectored diskette. Both 8" and 5.25" were given. For some reason, I don't recall and may never have known, FATids run from 0f8h - 0feh. That's not many. So there were overlaps, but the intent (...) was FATid of FE (8" 26 sector I think) could be re-used on a (say) 3" floppy with no confusion. But then PCDOS did that irritating check-for-data-in-the-boot-sector thing. The unix M tools should be able to read any properly formatted diskette, even if a wondows machine wont.