I consider this bit unlikely TBH. 5.25" *IDE* HDDs were _extremely_ rare. The 5.25" format was dead before IDE came along, and 99% were 3.5", except the Quantum Bigfoot range. Those were slow, unreliable, but cheap. I have one, as a sentimental reminder of full-width hard disk drives from the beginning of my career.

Not quite answering the question you asked, but optical drives from 15-25 years ago are 5.25" IDE devices.

On 7/21/21 8:19 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: CDC/Imprimis certainly had ATA half-height 5.25 drives in their Wren II line--I used them. e.g. 94204 series.

CDC 94208-51, 62, -75. The -51 is Compaq drive type 17.

CDC 94208-51, 62, -75. The -51 is Compaq drive type 17.

On Jul 21, 2021, at 2:42 PM, Jules Richardson via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote: On 7/21/21 12:51 PM, r.stricklin via cctech wrote: Interesting! Were they built as IDE drives from the ground up, or were they ST506/412 types with an additional board grafted on doing the interface conversion?

On Jul 21, 2021, at 12:00 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: On 7/21/21 3:20 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Um ... that's not true. I just purchased 10Base? cards specifically for the AUI ports to connect to my 10Base5 / "Thicknet" segment. Depending on price, I'd probably walk away from a swap meet with more too.

I suspect there are more people restoring ISA systems than PCI systems. But that's probably a matter of time.

I doubt it's likely, but (traditional) WORM drives are not out of the question. (I'm not counting CDs / DVDs in the /traditional/ WORM mix, despite many early writable drives being exactly that.)

Sadly, that might not be enough to discern things. I've seen similar cases used for a lot of different internal components.

The OP (or someone else on their behalf) is almost certainly going to need to get more details to share with would be buyers.

Um ... that's not true. I just purchased 10Base? cards specifically for the AUI ports to connect to my 10Base5 / "Thicknet" segment. Depending on price, I'd probably walk away from a swap meet with more too.

It depends. I've talked with a handful of people wanting some sort of CD-ROM or their retro computers. They prefer the faster IDE drives. But they would rather have the slower IDE drives than nothing. So I believe that there is a reasonable chance that CD-ROMs sill have some value.

I still see some value in 2D cards. I'd lay down a $5 bill for a PCI 2D card like I had years ago. -- If I'm willing to do it, I assume that there are others that are willing to do it too.

It depends on the capacity and price. And /known/ status of the drive. "For parts"? Probably not much value at all. Maybe for in a lot for someone else to test. "Known working / passed SpinRite Level 4" much more likely.

They aren't IDE, but I suspect that drives in IBM PS/2s that were known to be working would be worth more than the smaller IDE drives. I think that mostly means ESDI and SCSI.

Though it sounds like the OP wasn't interested in doing this. As such, I suspect that the OP is probably looking for someone to acquire (large portions of) the lot and let that buyer test / resell things with details and shipping to lots of places.

On Tuesday, July 20, 2021, 01:11:15 PM CDT, Kevin Anderson <kevin_anderson_dbq at yahoo.com> wrote: For a time I had quite a few Compaq Deskpro towers that had acquired (for free) from my employer after they updated to a newer HP Compaq model. These Compaq Deskpros were the white-boxed variety with Pentium III the like processors that date to the later part of the 1990s and into the 2000s. They interested me because they were able to work with the flavors of Linux that were becoming plentiful and useful at the time (like Mandrake, etc.) Anyway, the desktops themselves are gone, as well as the PC keyboards and the monitors that went with them, with this paragraph just setting the scene....

In response to Chuck Guzis' mentioning that there was more than one design of what was labeled a Compaq "Deskpro" during the time of PIII processors: the series of desktops that I used to have,, and from where the extra boards and drives I have were all pulled, collectively would be called the Deskpro EN series. Here is sample picture found on the web https://www.visualalchemy.tv/images/products/671caaf2be654938bd29fd137ed029… Not all actually desktops I dealt with said "EN" on the nameplate, as I believe there was a brief period early on of Compaq switching over to the new case design before the EN series was completely defined, but the basic case design was all the same with option for tower or on-the-side use. This may better date the likely styles of boards and drives I have. I don't recall any of the original computers at work were of the small form factor version in the same series, although I'd expect the parts involved would have still been similar if they had been.

My boss back in 90/91 or so bought a Compaq 386SX desktop. The 386SX was at the low end back then already, but the keyboard which came with it was top-notch! Forget early IBM PC keyboards. This Compaq keyboard had the best feel ever when typing! Unfortunately I never was able to find this keyboard again, and my boss wouldn't give it to me when he dumped the 386SX :-( He kept the keyboard.

I remember when a Compaq 386 was I think the first 386 I ever worked on.

I think the Compaq was a Deskpro

If memory serves, that mass of floppies was dwarfed by Windows 95, particularly later versions.

Aside: I don't think I've ever seen Windows 98 on floppies. I think I've only seen CD-ROM. Though I expect that there is a way, likely from Microsoft, to create the floppies.

Some further questions BELOW to complete the distribution media database:

1) Which ones were available on 5.25"?? (and how many disks?) ????A) "360K"? ????B) "1.2M"? ????C) "1.4M"? ????D) Microsoft non-standard crammed 3.5" HD? (1.7M?)

First CD-ROM install media that I got was Windows 3.00, but it was an inclusion on a "tools" collection CD-ROM (not quite a shovel-ware). Then a Multi-Language 3.00 CD-ROM from Microsoft (for international market)

The Chinese lady that I shared an office with was thrilled, because she was trying to teach herself Spanish, and that, along with the McCracken FORTRAN in Spanish were here preferred method.

3.10 Windows CD-ROM from Microsoft

When did MS-DOS come on CD-ROM?? Or did it?

Microsoft C compiler Version 5.00 on CD-ROM

Well, maybe similarly to how you did with AIX, by the total size divided by number of images.? Although what I was referring to was people's memories of the size of the box that they kept the install disks in :-)

The "Tools" CD-ROM was a third party commercial product containing a large collection of CD-ROM drivers.

In August 1991, I attended a Microsoft Developer conference in Seattle. Bill Gates didn't show up, because he was in NYC on TV about the birthday of 5150 (August 11, 1981).? They gave us copies of Windows 3.10 (which couldn't load on the 286 laptop that I had brought along, because it didn't have A20 support, and gave those of us who asked that international distribution Windows 3.0 CD-ROM.? Never saw it before or since. It had Windows 3.0 installation with at least half a dozen different languages.

Actually, you can, and easily. MS-DOS 6 had an "INSTALL" program, which was demented.? It INSISTED on installing on drive C:.? But, some of my machines had four floppies, and I didn't want it to install on the 8" drive, or 3.25" drive, . . . Once you install it on SOME/ANY OTHER machine, then, with that OTHER machine booted up to DOS 6, just do a FORMAT A: /S of a boot floppy, and copy files onto that, specifically including FORMAT.

FORGET ABOUT THE "INSTALLATION" files.? with extreme prejudice. Boot your target machine with the DOS 6 boot floppy;? it has FORMAT.COM on it (which IIRC was actually a .EXE file renamed .COM), and then use that to FORMAT C: /S .

Once that system format is done, and CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are up, then all of the rest is just copying files, which can be COPY *.*.

For learning any language, it helps a LOT to have a copy of something that you are familiar with in that language.? When she started to learn Spanish, I gave her a copy of McCracken FORTRAN in Spanish (she was familiar with, and had a copy of, the English edition), and loaned her the international Win3.0 disc.? She then setup one machine with Win3 in English, one in Chinese, and one in Spansish. Win3.0 could run on an 8088, which were then a dime a dozen. I don't know whether you could put more than one copy on a machine.? I think that you could - we had a copy of Win3.1 on a Win95 machine!

But, the Windows 3.10 BETA program sent us tons of floppies.

It had an even more demented problem: it installed Smartdrv first. Then, if it hit any error, the installation would fail, without the usual option to IGNORE and manually copy the failed file later. Instead, SMARTDRV cut out the options, and you could only R(etry)!? If the error wasn't transient, then you could only power down the machine! But SMARTDRV had told DOS that stuff was ALREADY written that it hadn't done yet, so powering down wiped the whole installation.? I had one machine that had an error that neither SpinRite nor SpeedStor could find, but the Windoze installation consistently found it!? The work around was to put a lot of extraneous files on the disk, so that the sector with the error was used by something else.? I reported the problem to the BETA support; their response was "That's a HARDWARE problem, NOT OUR PROBLEM."? My comment that 1) any program should exit gracefully even from a hardware problem, not lock up the machine and 2) that SMARTDRV's actions would end up costing them substantially.? (It DID; DOS 6.20 was written primarily to deal with SMARTDRV causing problems!)? 'course my comment also meant that I wasn't invited back for any other BETA programs; they only wanted cheerleaders, not critics nor actual testers.

It eliminated another LARGE box of floppies.

On 7/23/21 6:43 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: Maybe someone who is more versed in the possible disk sizes and more accurate (non-rounded) count. I'm extremely foggy when it comes to 5-1/4 inch disk capacities. 720 kB and 1.44 MB disks I can deal with. But the minutia between 320 kB and 360 kB, combined with rounded measurements, things get foggy for me.

Talk about a chicken and egg / priming problem. How do you get the CD-ROM drivers off of the CD-ROM that you need a driver to access. ;-) The quintessential answer is to have (access to) another system (or driver) assist. Windows 3.x was relatively easy to streamline the installation by doing -- what I think is called -- an "administrative" install such that it copies all files off of the floppies into a single directory, presumably on a network share, in a way that means that you can subsequently run setup therefrom. I don't remember if simply copying all the files into a single directory also sufficed. Ya. I know that I can manually install MS-DOS by sysing boot media (floppy or hard disk) and copying the contents of the DOS directory. But that seems like more of a hack than should be necessary. Though it can be made less annoying. I feel like there /should/ be a way to streamline the MS-DOS 6.22 installation using methods from Microsoft. But, maybe I'm asking for too much. Or more likely, I've simply not found it yet. I do sort of like the installer from the 3rd party MS-DOS 7.10 CD-ROM that's floating around the Internet. That's the general idea of what I'd like. ACK I think you definitely could put more than one copy of Windows 3.x on a single machine. The biggest point of contention I see would be parts of CONFIG.SYS that reference drivers inside of the Windows directory. However there are plenty of ways to deal with that. Beyond that, it's just another directory that consumes disk space. Aside: I've got a virtual machine with the following installed and bootable using Microsoft boot options: - MS-DOS 6.22 - Windows 3.11 (on top of MS-DOS 6.22) - Windows 95 - Windows 98* - Windows NT - Windows 2000 - Windows XP *I'm just shy of 100% certain that both 95 and 98 were on there. I did it as an exercise to see if it would work, and it does. I think I did the install in that order. MS-DOS 6.22 vs Windows 3.11 was simply a matter of starting Windows (WIN) at the command prompt. Windows 95 brought in it's MSDOS.SYS based boot menu and allowed booting "MS-DOS" (or something like that). I think Windows 98 had an option to augment 95's boot menu to allow both 95 and 98. Windows NT / 2000 / XP brought in BOOT.INI and another "Older Windows" (nomenclature?) menu option as well as NT / 2k / XP. I bet. Ya. Thankfully (?) I started with computers after that and avoided things like that. ;-) -- Grant. . . . unix || die

On Jul 24, 2021, at 5:12 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: A very good discussion including the 2M and 2MGUI driver.The author, Ciriaco Garc?a de Celis sent me the 2M program sometime around 1994. It's interesting, and uses 82 cylinders on a DSHD drive and can come pretty near to 2M. There was also a 2MGUI (having nothing to do with graphics) version that could claim to get 2M bytes on a DSHD 3.5" drive in 82 cylinders. The way it was done was to Format one 128-byte sector per track with a length indicator of 16KB. Obviously, 16K won't fit on a track, so when writing, the drive was deselected the next time the index came around, cutting the transfer short. Actually, I think a 200 msec timer was used for the cutoff. You didn't get the sector CRC transfered, but you got what amounts to a full track of data in an odd-sized (not a power of 2) sector. Reading, of course, didn't care about the excess data. That's perhaps the most extreme case I can think of; it's discussed here: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/floppy-capacity-math/ No way I would ever trust this for archival purposes--and I replied to the author the same way. Heck, I wouldn't trust writing on cylinders 80,81, given the quality of DSHD media. All of this was academic after a bit as Zip, Jaz, Sparq, etc. external drives became very common. --Chuck

LOT'S OF GOOD INFORMATION HERE! I am keeping this one Fred, and thank you. ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2021 3:27 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Distribution floppies (Was: Microsoft OSs (was: Install Floppies) OK, I am going to take a chance that you, or others here, want to know more about it. The sizes that would be used were: 360K 1.2M 1.4M DMF 1.64M XDF 1.8M TLDR: Other PC formats: "160K" 5.25": August 1981, the 5150 ("PC") was released with 5.25" "industry standard" Tandon TM100-1 drives. IBM was not ready to use double sided. DOS 1.00 300 RPM, 48 Tracks Per inch, 250,000 bits per second 1 side, 40 tracks, 8 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector 163,840 160K Please note: This is not "rounded", it is based on K meaning Kibibyte of 1024 bytes. "320K": DOS 1.10 Same, but double sided. 2 sides * 40 cylinders (trackse per side) * 8 Sectors per track * 512 BPS 327,680 320K "180K": DOS 2.00 Change from 8 sectors pr track to 9 sectors per track. Single sided version: 1 side * 40 tracks * 9 SPT * 512 BPS 184,320 180K "360K": Same but double sided. 2 sides * 40 cylinders * 9 SPT * 512 BPS 368,640 360K Some software distribution continued to be on 180K, to allow for customers who still used single sided drives. "720K" 5.25": NON-USA PC-DOS 2.10 IBM PC-JX (not sold in USA) had an 80 track per side 5.25" drive (what some CP/M companies called "Quad Density") "720K": MS-DOS 2.11 OEM versions of MS-DOS were sometimes provided with 720K support, primarily companies that had implemented 3.5" drives, such as Gavilan, Zenith, Data General, etc. They did not all use the same numbers of sectors in the file system overhead. For example, Gavilan, when switching from 2.11J to 2.11K changed to be compatible with the later IBM 3.5" format. "1.2M"/"HD 5.25": PC-DOS 3.00 IBM PC/AT (5170) supported a "High Density" 5.25" 96 tracks per inch, 360 RPM 500,000; bits per second. 2 sides * 80 cylinders * 15 SPT * 512 BPS 1,228,800 1,200K 1.17MiB 1.2 MARKETING-MEGABYTES (1,000 * 1,024) The AT controller ALSO supported 250,000 bits per second, for 300 RPM 360K drives and 300,000 bits per second, for 360K disks in the 360RPM 1.2M drive. (Many companies then came out with two speed (300RPM and 360RPM) drives, 300RPM in the 1.2M drive permitted 250,000 bits per second for 360K disks) Weltek developed a kludge o 180RPM at 250,000 bits per second. MSCDEX (drive related, but not floppy) 3.10 The "network redirector" (undocumented for a while) permitted MSCDEX to fool DOS into thinking that a CD-ROM was NOT A DRIVE ON THE MACHINE, but was, instead a remote service on a network. Attempting to CHKDSK a CD-ROM gave "Can not CHKDSK a network drive". "720K 3.5": PC-DOS 3.20 135 tracks per inch, 250,000 bits per second 2 sides * 80 cylinders * 9 SPT * 512 BPS 737,280 720K (could also be added to PC (5150), XT (5160) machines) DOS 3.20 added DRIVER.SYS that added 720K support to DOS, and DRIVPARM that changed the drive parameters without an additional driver. I can not fully explain why DRIVPARM worked with PC-DOS and MS-DOS on aftermarket ATs, but FAILED on ATs with IBM AT BIOS, with either DOS. "1.4M": PC-DOS 3.30 "High Density" 3.5" 135 tracks per inch, 500,000 bits per second 2 sides * 80 cylinders * 18 SPT * 512 BPS 1,474,560 1,440K 1.40625 MiB; 1.44 MARKETING-MEGABYTES Note that the only way that you can get 1.44 is if you define "Megabyte" to be 1,024,000 1000 * 1024 (So, yes, "1.4M" is ROUNDED) HDD >32M (not floppy) MS-DOS 3.31, PC-DOS 4.00 Note that IBM did not warn Norton in advance, so the Norton fUtilities had difficulties on PC-DOS 4.00, which was usually reported as "DOS 4 is not compatible and buggy". Most of those "bugs" went away with the next release of Norton. "2.8M" PC-DOS 4.00 1,000,000 bits per second (or could be kludged with 500,000 bits per second at 150RPM) 2 sides * 80 cylinders * 36 SPT * 512 BPS 2,949,120; 2880 K; 2.8125 MiB; 2.88 MARKETING MEGABYTES It never really caught on. "DMF": Microsoft Distribution Media Format By cheating on the intersector-gaps, Microsoft managed to get 21 sectors per track, instead of 18 on "1.4M" disks! 2 sides * 80 cylinders * 21 SPT * 512 1,720,320; 1680 K; 1.640625MiB; 1.68 MARKETING MEGABYTES Floptical, USB, and other drives that have their own firmware can't handle them. Older versions of DOS need a device driver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://web.archive.org/web/20110914232540/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/… "XDF": IBM chose a different approach. Because the inter-sector gaps are relatively standard, you can fit more on a disk using larger sectors. Eight 1024 byte sectors will fit on a HD 3.5" track. There isn't enough room for a ninth one. But, what about bigger than 1,024? An 8K sector will fit on a track; certainly not enough room for a second one. BUT, there is enough room left for a 2K! and then enough for a 1K, and then enough for a 512 byte sector. Their driver software fooled DOS into thinking that it was seeing Twenty-three 512 byte sectors! http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-xdf-diskette-format/ 2 sides * 80 cylinders * 23 "virtual sectors" * 512 BPS 1,884,160; 1840K; 1.796875 MiB; 1.84 MARKETING-MEGABYTES FOOTNOTES: 1) All sizes are the total size on the disk; I did not deal with [here] the space taken up by fle directory and other file system overhead. I also didn't mention that some systems used 35 of the 40 tracks, or 75 or 77 of the 80 tracks (77 tracks was the standard for 8") 2) There were other choices besides what IBM picked for bytes per sector and sectors per track. Some systems ued TEN 512 byte sectors per track. That required minimizing the gaps between sectors, which sometimes create read problems with NEC 765 type FDCs. (temporarily running the drive slightly slower than the standard 300 RPM could sometimes get a successful read). Therefore, 40 track double sided double density could be anywhere from 300K to 400K, depending on layout, NOT just 360K. Different density calls for different sensitivity or coercivity of the media. 5.25" is available in 300 and 600 Oersted. They do NOT interhange reliably! The color of the cookie is different. Some say to look for a hub ring. EARLY 5.25" did not have a hub ring, and sometimes the drive mangled the hub, so they started reinfocing the hub. By the time of 1.2M, the drives had been improved, and it was decided that hub rings weren't necessary any more. hence, a disk with a hub ring is probably a late 360K; a disk without a hub ring is either EARLY 360K, aor 1.2M. 3.5" is available with 600 or 720-750 Oersted. The difference is close enough that one can often get away with the wrong one. Both types have a write protect hole, but the 1.4M has an additional hole to indicate "high density". 2.8M also has a hole, but it is in a slightly different place. 3) MS-DOS/PC-DOS version numbers are ALWAYS a major version number, a period, then a TWO DIGIT minor version number. DOS 2.10 sees itself as DOS 2, 0Ah. YES, it is a TEN, not a ONE! 3.31 intenally is 3,1Fh. There is no version 3.3; it is internally 3.THIRTY 4) There is some confusion regarding number of tracks on drives with multiple heads, does a 720K disk have 80 tracks or 160 tracks? A work-around for that confusion is to use "CYLINDERS", or "TRACKS PER SIDE". 5) 67.5 tracks per inch 3.5 inch drives, with 40 tracks per side, EXISTED. Epson Geneve PX-8 is the only system that I am aware of that used them. 6) "Kilobyte" is widely accepted as meaning 1,024 bytes, although the 'K' prefix means 1,000 in most other contexts. "KibiByte" is one attempt to solve that. BUT, 'M' means 1,000,000 in most contexts, and [rarely] 1,000. MebiByte is the unambiguous term for 2 to the tenth power, 1,048,576 "MegaByte" has at least three definitions. 1,048,576 ("MebiByte" 2^20) 1,000,000 (which lets barketing claim more "megabytes") 1,024,000 ("MARKETING MEGABYTE" of 1,000 * 1,024 (10^3 * 2^10) 7) What does "HIGH density" mean? Was that the mental state of those that named it? In the beginning, there was FM "Frequency Modulated" - clock pulses with a '1' pulse or '0' no pulse in between. When there were multiple '1' pulses with their clock pulses in a row, there were limits to how close they could be, and therefore how fast, or how many per inch. But, SOME bit patterns didn't have any tight spaces. By finding 32 or 64 different patterns that COULD be squeezed, it was possible to choose ones to represent 5 or 6 bit patterns very tightly. With a translation table between the 8 bit values and multiple "sueezable" patterns, one could get about 40% more data in a given space; hence GCR "Group Coded Record" coding, as used on Apple and Commodore, and a few others. Going back to FM, . . . Clock pulses weren't really needed between adjacent '1' pulses. If you simply left out THOSE clock pulses, then the resulting pattern was less dense, and the stream could be squeezed (higher data transfer rate) to almost twice as much data per time or space. Hence MFM "Modified Frequency Modulation". The marketing people called that "DOUBLE DENSITY", But, it oversimplified enough that it caught on. Now that "DOUBLE DENSITY" existed, it was inevitable and soon that FM became known as "SINGLE DENSITY", even though some engineers said that FM was "half" density (one data bit for every two pulse spaces), and that MFM ought be called "single density". THUS, if you look at historical records, the term "DOUBLE DENSITY" came into being BEFORE the term "SINGLE DENSITY"! (Cf. "World War II" V "World War I" (previously "The Great War")) 8) SOME/MANY companies referred to double density with twice as many tracks (such as the 720K format) as "QUAD DENSITY". Intertec/Superbrain) used "QUAD DENSITY" to refer to double density 40 tracks per side with 2 sides. THAT certainly created confusion. But, there's MORE! When they came out with an 80 track double sided double density format, they called that "SUPER Density". Thet abbreviated that "SD", which just about everybody else used as abbreviation for "SINGLE DENSITY"! 9) In addition to squeezing ten 512 byte sectors on a track, some people even tried using additional tracks. Since there usually isn't a hard stop after track 39 (or 79), most drives could handle 41 or 42 (81 or 82) tracks. John Henderson (March/9/1944 - January/31/2017) of Tall Tree Systems created a popular program called JFORMAT to squeeze ten sectors and more tracks. He is also remembered for JRAM, some of the first expanded memory boards. "Extended" used OS modes that understood more memory; "Expanded" worked in 1M/640K by moving a block of high memory at a time into a space in the 1M address range. He was then shut out of the negotiations when Lotus/Intel/Microsoft developed their LIM/EMS standard. I remember when he came out with the JRAM boards, he asked everybody at the West Coast Computer Faire, "DO you do any software that uses lots of memory?" Not looking for a contractor for a specific project, he was trying to create a market for big memory boards. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 7/23/21 2:11 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: }:-) Ugh ... I don't know and I don't have a good way to differentiate my disk images. I would like to know more about, or better find a copy, of such a CD-ROM. I do wish that I could do an install of MS-DOS 6.22, CD-ROM driver + MSCDExec, DOSidle, and Windows 3.x on a CD-ROM for simplifying installations in virtual machines. I've not yet figured out how to put all of the install files for MS-DOS 6.22 in one directory, boot and do the install.? My minimal passes at doing so don't work as well as I want or get stuck wanting to change the disk based on the disk label. > Interesting. > When did MS-DOS come on CD-ROM?? Or did it?

My recollection of the DMF Microsoft period was that if you purchased a retail MS product using the DMF format and couldn't get it read on your system, a call to MS would result in a standard format copy being shipped.

from IBM with PC-DOS) used a different non-FAT file system which took up

On 7/24/21 10:26 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > My recollection of the DMF Microsoft period was that if you purchased a > retail MS product using the DMF format and couldn't get it read on your > system, a call to MS would result in a standard format copy being shipped.

It's my understanding that The DMF disks that Microsoft (and comparable from IBM with PC-DOS) used a different non-FAT file system which took up less space on the disk, thus yielding more storage for data. But that they both fit on the same /standard/ ""1.44 MB disks.

I also seem to recall that Macintosh's could get 1.7 MB on the same ""1.44 MB disks.

But I could be completely wrong.

On Mon, 26 Jul 2021, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:

"inter sector gaps", "write splice", etc. not "guard bands"? any "bands" (synonym for circle) would be between tracks. But, VERY good important point that you bring up. If a disk will ever get a sector re-written, than it needs those write splice gaps. But, if a disk will be written once, and NEVER get any sectors changed, then it could get way with very tiny intersector gaps and write splices.

On Fri, 23 Jul 2021 at 18:56, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Win95: 13 disks. Win98: 38 disks.

Some of the early Xenix distros were about as massive, when you included development tools. And OS?2 on floppy when accompanied by the relevant CSDs could also run into many disks.

On 7/23/21 11:23 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: That's fewer than I remember. Though, Windows 3.1 was 6 disks and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was 8 disks. That was on top of MS-DOS 6.22 which was 3 disks. For a total of 9 or 11. So, 13 isn't that big of a jump.

from hard disk -- and so that in some years, when SSDs were common and

Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

I have 29 disk images in my collection for NetWare 3.11.

$ReadingList++

Oh good $DEITY! I would have borrowed a 2nd floppy drive from another system, done the copy, and returned the floppy drive. It would probably have been faster.

Ya. I bet.

<ASCII shruggie>

from the West.

Ya. Early Linux, which Slackware in the '90s definitely qualifies as, often had a chicken and egg problem. You could create a new boot disk and / or modules for hardware /if/ /only/ you had a functional Linux system to do it from. Bootstraping Linux in the '90s was ... touchy.

I had several A-B-C-D DC37 switch boxes.? One for the multiple controller boards (Cordata, EiconScript, JRAM+?) for my Cordata (CX engine) laser printer; and a few for machines where I had multiple external floppy drives.

On 7/26/21 5:36 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Interesting.

I've not really tried to do this on Windows.

But I would wonder if you could mount an alternate file system on top of the Users / Documents and Settings folder using -- what I believe is called -- Dynamic Data Overlay. Very much like you would mount /home as a file system independent from /. I don't know if there would be any dependency on Administrator's profile being accessible before DDO mounted everything.

I suspect that more time is spent finding them and traversing the file system meta-data than reading the actual config files.

I've never tried to do anything like this with OS X. I would naively think that you could mount another file system on /home. But, maybe there's dependencies that I'm not aware of.

The only rare exception would be like having /home be a symbolic link to /path/to/home which is on another file system. This is how I have my VPS use LUKS encryption. /home -> /var/LUKS/home; /var/spool/mail -> /var/LUKS/var/spool/mail; etc.

/me looks at the mailing list and the things that are discussed and reject the "obsolete" portion of that comment.

Interesting.

Here is an inventory of what I have for parts that I am desiring to pass on to others if they are interested or to seek permission to pitch to an electronics recycler (or rubbish bin) if these things are of limited value due to being plentiful.