schmitz@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Thomas Schmitz) (02/11/88)
I recently posted a question about formatting 3.5-inch floppies at 720K on an XT clone. From the responses so far, I can see that I didn't make the question as clear as I could have. Here's another try, hopefully better. A friend of mine has a Toshiba 3.5-inch floppy drive installed on his XT clone. Using DRIVER.SYS, he is able to read and write disks on this drive with both MS-DOS 3.2 and PC-DOS 3.3. He can also format disks as 360K in this drive. However, attempts to format at 720K fail in the following manner: The drive steps through its full range in 41 tracks and begins to bang. (ASCII is insufficient for reproducing the noise as he repeated it to me! :-) He assumes that this banging would continue for the remainder of the 80 tracks a 720K disk would have, though he aborted the format before this would have completed. He also tried the MS-DOS 3.2 DRIVPARM command with equal success. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. -- Tom Schmitz ARPA: schmitz@zeus.cs.umn.edu 2111 21st Avenue South UUCP: ...!rutgers!umn-cs!schmitz Minneapolis, MN 55404 CSNET: schmitz%zeus%umn-cs.arpa@relay.cs.net (612) 340-1855
pjh@mccc.UUCP (Peter J. Holsberg) (02/12/88)
I have a 3.5" 720K on my XT clone (put it there last fall) and I seem to
recall that FORMAT B: would produce but 360K (no banging). I believe
I had to format it as F: (I have 2 HDs and a ramdisk for C:, D:, E:) to get
720K. Actually, I now use PCTools formatter and that works on B: directly.
If you don't any detailed help, e-mail me and I'm check my system more
carefully.
--
Peter Holsberg UUCP: {rutgers!}princeton!mccc!pjh
Technology Division CompuServe: 70240,334
Mercer College GEnie: PJHOLSBERG
Trenton, NJ 08690 Voice: 1-609-586-4800Jerry_Grynspan@ankh.UUCP (Jerry Grynspan) (02/13/88)
I have a similar setup. I have a 5.25 as drive A: A 3.5 as drive B: and a 30meg as drive C:. Using driver.sys will result in the 3.5 being treated as drive D: If he wishes to access drive B: as 720k, he shoul "Assign b=d". Then he will be prompted to insert a disk in the drive and it will function for reads and writes as it should. BUT formats should be referred to drive D or there will be no success since DOS will not format a "assigned" drive --- * Origin: Eye of Osiris [305-973-1947] ankh.UUCP or (Opus 1:369/6) SEEN-BY: 369/6