bulk erase floppies for use with putr?

Jerome Fine replies: I would imagine that it would not hurt to bulk erase the floppy media before you use PUTR to format them as RX50 media. BUT you must remember to use DSDD 360 KByte PC media for the RX50 floppies that are used with an RX50 drive in a DEC PDP-11/73 or as READ ONLY with an RX33 drive using an RQDX3 controller. In the past, I started with bulk erased DSDD media which had never been used at all. They always worked well as RX50 after PUTR gave them a Low Level Format (LLF) without any file structure. It depends. I presume that you want to use the DSDD floppies as RX50 media whereas the 1.2 MB HD PC 5 1/4" media are used as RX33 on the DEC PDP-11/73 systems with the RQDX3 controller. However, on the PC you MUST use the HD 1.2 MB drives since the RX50 used 80 tracks, NOT 40 tracks at 10 sectors per track. So the RX50 tracks are as close as the HD tracks (side by side) and must be as narrow, but the track density is about the same as the DSDD 360 KByte media which is different magnetically This was all covered a few years ago, so if you can find those archives, just read all the e-mails. I have used both PUTR and E11 successfully under W98SE drive as B: with A: being the 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drive. My motherboard BIOS is able to recognize 2 floppy drives. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.