gcw20877@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (George Wang) (11/28/89)
I recently brought a Toshiba 3.5" 1.44 meg High Denisty drive in hope of being able to do a "trick" that is done on Toshiba laptops and IBM PS/2 computers... I wanted to do some high volume backups by using regular, low cost 720K generic disks and formatting them to 1.44 megs.. I heard that Toshiba drives are capable of doing this... I also have a Western Digital WD1006-RA2 controller which supports such "intelligent" drives.. I am also using Pheonix AT BIOS 3.10 However, I have not been able to format the disks at 1.44 megs.. It keeps on giving me invalid media/bad track 0... The funny thing is, is that I can use a legit 1.44 meg diskette, cover the high density hole and format the it at 1.44 megs even though technically the drive thinks it's a 720K disk... But this is ONLY if I use a REAL high density disk and not a fake 720K disk... My question is how can I get it to work.. Is it something with DOS or the BIOS..... I know Toshiba laptops and PS/2 can do this but I can't get mine to work.. (I am running PCDOS 3.2 by the way....) Any ideas? Please email as I don't keep up with the newsgroups... Thanks in advance, George -- George Wang University of Illinois gcw20877@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu
davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) (11/28/89)
In article <1989Nov27.220237.20770@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> gcw20877@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (George Wang) writes: | However, I have not been able to format the disks at 1.44 megs.. | It keeps on giving me invalid media/bad track 0... The funny | thing is, is that I can use a legit 1.44 meg diskette, cover | the high density hole and format the it at 1.44 megs even | though technically the drive thinks it's a 720K disk... But | this is ONLY if I use a REAL high density disk and not a fake | 720K disk... Don't think there's any trick involved, sounds like the cheap 720k disks you have are just not good enough. I have seen this when people punch the 1.44 hole in 720k disks, too. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" - anon