hollen@eta.megatek.uucp (Dion Hollenbeck) (05/22/89)
From article <3649@penet.UUCP>, by thomas@penet.UUCP (Thomas Aschan): > Does anybody have experience > with reading & writing 720 kB 5 1/4" > floppies? > Yes, I have Shugart 565 5 1/4" drives which are 720kb. I use them both as standard floppies and also with Fastback for backup purposes. I have needed to put "DRIVPARM /d:2 /h:2 /t:80" (check DOS manual for exact syntax since I am at work, not at home where the drives are) in my config.sys for them to work, or if on an AT, use setup and tell it that they are 3 1/2" 720kb drives. Unless you have some strange format, the 720kb drives are 2 heads, 80 tracks, 9 sectors per track, exactly the same as the 3 1/2" drives currently popular. One caveat, DRIVPARM does not work on DOS 3.3, but will work on 3.2. I spent lots of time figuring this one out, and I will never upgrade to 3.3 because of it. Dion Hollenbeck (619) 455-5590 x2814 Megatek Corporation, 9645 Scranton Road, San Diego, CA 92121 seismo!s3sun!megatek!hollen ames!scubed/
psfales@cbnewsc.ATT.COM (Peter Fales) (05/23/89)
In article <550@megatek.UUCP>, hollen@eta.megatek.uucp (Dion Hollenbeck) writes: > From article <3649@penet.UUCP>, by thomas@penet.UUCP (Thomas Aschan): > > Does anybody have experience > > with reading & writing 720 kB 5 1/4" > > floppies? > > > I have needed to put "DRIVPARM /d:2 /h:2 /t:80" (check DOS manual for > > One caveat, DRIVPARM does not work on DOS 3.3, but will work on 3.2. > I spent lots of time figuring this one out, and I will never upgrade to > 3.3 because of it. Actually, DRIVPARM does work if you perform the following monstrosity. This has been posted to the net before, and I am surprised it is now not more widely known. I am even more surprised that someone came up with this. I have tried this on several different machines and it does work! Alternatively, I have seen binary patches to MS-DOS (available on BBS's) to fix the problem, and I am told that Microsoft has fixed it in MS-DOS 3.30A. Enjoy. ---------------------- begin reposting ------------------------------ From ttrdc!att!rutgers!apple!bbn!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!harrier.ukc.ac.uk!rde Mon Feb 27 04:25:16 1989 Path: ttrde!ttrdc!att!rutgers!apple!bbn!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!harrier.ukc.ac.uk!rde From: rde@ukc.ac.uk (R.D.Eager) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: DRIVPARM config.sys variable - how do I access it? Keywords: PC-DOS 3.30,DRIVPARM,config.sys Message-ID: <238@harrier.ukc.ac.uk> Date: 27 Feb 89 10:25:16 GMT References: <606@infovax.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de> Reply-To: rde@ukc.ac.uk (R.D.Eager) Organization: Computing Lab, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Lines: 18 I did post this before, but I fear it got lost.... There is a simple way of making DRIVPARM work, at least on PC-DOS 3.3 (I have tried it and it works). It is *extremely* baroque, but who cares? Place three control-A characters (yes, the ASCII value 1) into the line after the DRIVPARM= bit, before the parameters. If we represent CONTROL-A as ^A, the line might look like this: DRIVPARM=^A^A^A/D:n /F:n ... etc I don't know why it works, but it sure does! -- Bob Eager rde@ukc.UUCP ...!mcvax!ukc!rde Phone: +44 227 764000 ext 7589 -- Peter Fales AT&T, Room 5B-420 2000 N. Naperville Rd. UUCP: ...att!ihlpb!psfales Naperville, IL 60566 Domain: psfales@ihlpb.att.com work: (312) 979-8031