[comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc] 10 sectors/track

depeche@cs.mcgill.ca (Acme Instant Dehydrated Boulder Kit) (04/07/91)

Apologies if this topic came up before, but I only started checking out
this newsgroup recently, when I acquired a 286 laptop.

It is equipped with a 1.44mb 3.5" drive, which is very nice.
My previous computer was an atari 1040st.

As some of you may know, the 1040st has a similar file system to that of
MS-Dos. Originally, the boot sector was not a 'proper ms-dos' bootsector,
but in recent versions of tos, disks formatted on the ST are totally
readable under MS-Dos.

On my ST it was commonplace for me to format disks with
10 sectors per track. This would effectively give me 800k of usable data on
every 3.5" double density disk, as opposed to 720k.
These same disks are readable and writable on my 286 laptop!!!!

So my question is: are there programs out there for MS-Dos which will
format and copy 3.5" disks with 10 sectors per track (or 20 sectors per
track for High-Density)?  Or does this cause problems with compatibility?

please carbon-copy all followups to me, as I may miss them here (this
newsgroup sure has lots of activity!!).

thanks in advance!!

-- 
|S. Alan Ezust		: McGill University School of Computer Science      |
|depeche@cs.mcgill.ca	:	     Montreal, Quebec, Canada		    |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|

depeche@cs.mcgill.ca (Acme Instant Dehydrated Boulder Kit) (04/09/91)

In article <1991Apr7.043416.20338@cs.mcgill.ca> depeche@cs.mcgill.ca (Acme Instant Dehydrated Boulder Kit) writes:
>
>
>So my question is: are there programs out there for MS-Dos which will
>format and copy 3.5" disks with 10 sectors per track (or 20 sectors per
>track for High-Density)?  Or does this cause problems with compatibility?
>
I am following up to my own mesage now..
From some help from fellow users, I found fdformt2 on
msdos.archive.umich.edu [141.211.168.70] which does the trick quite nicely.
thanks for your help!

-- 
|S. Alan Ezust		: McGill University School of Computer Science      |
|depeche@cs.mcgill.ca	:	     Montreal, Quebec, Canada		    |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------|