19 Dec
2004
19 Dec
'04
12:47 a.m.
On Sun, 19 Dec 2004, Nico de Jong wrote:
Normally, there would not be a problem, supposing it
is a 360K disk (I guess
you are talking about 5.25" disks).
What I _have_ seen, is that "modern" BIOS'es have problems / cannot read
disks formatted as 320K. Back in the old days, 5.25" disks came in even more
flavours, like 160K (I've never seen an 80K 5.25" though)
Somewhere I have a list of the FATid byte values for all the
IBM and MSDOS 5.25" diskettes. Basically they include:
sides density spt capacity
1 double 8 160k
1 double 9 180k
2 double 8 320k
2 double 9 360k
spt means 'sectors per track' physical
Then there's issues with @#$%^ IBM (or m'soft) looking for
text in the boot sector and not just that FATid (the 1st byte
of each FAT) to ID disks, rendering otherwise-proper MSDOS
diskettes unusable.
AFAIK, IBM never supported single-density. The hardware isn't
the problem, there's no FATid defined for it. And who wants
86K diskettes, anyways?