[256 color BMP] "File not Found"

Twiggy

Ok, so I got a picture I like, and wanted to use it as my wallpaper on my windows 3.1 system, so I downloaded it, converted it to a 256 bmp (went into paint and saved it as a 256 bmp) and then saved it onto a floppy, however when I try to read the disk on my 3.1 system, it says "files not found" as in it didn't find any files on the disk and file manager is blank.


anyone know what I did wrong or missed or what?

wingzeroismine

Is the system reading other floppies fine?

Twiggy

wingzeroismine wrote:

Is the system reading other floppies fine?

yupsy daisy, it even formatted one.

wingzeroismine

Try having it format this floppy and then copy the image to it?

Twiggy

wingzeroismine wrote:

Try having it format this floppy and then copy the image to it?

just tried that, it worked.


Weirdly neither computer said that the previous floppy had any issues, neither my windows xp or my windows 3.1

wingzeroismine

Hrm... I should have explained better...

Have your 3.1 machine reformat the floppy that it's currently unable to read, then copy the picture to it.

Josh

You probably weren't using FAT16 which is what I *think* 3.1 requires for the file system.

wingzeroismine

Yes Dos 6.22 and 3.1 would require fat16, technically floppies should be formatted as fat12 but the distinction between the two is never spelled out anywhere.

It should be somewhat uncommon for a floppy to be formatted as anything else, but do put it back into the PC that can read it and see what format its in!

thinkpadman

wingzeroismine wrote:

Yes Dos 6.22 and 3.1 would require fat16, technically floppies should be formatted as fat12 but the distinction between the two is never spelled out anywhere.

Point 20 has a basic table of the difference:
http://www.c-jump.com/CIS24/Slides/FAT/lecture.html#F01_0280_information

SomeGuy

wingzeroismine wrote:

It should be somewhat uncommon for a floppy to be formatted as anything else, but do put it back into the PC that can read it and see what format its in!

I've encountered a number of times where a floppy disk, even though it is DOS formatted FAT12, is readable in one computer and either looks blank or full of garbage on another.

Usually this is because there is some non-standard FAT12 layout, such as a larger than normal amount of reserved sectors, or different cluster sizes. It looks blank because the problem computer is looking in the wrong place for the root directory. These kinds of variations are technically valid, and work fine under some versions of DOS, but not others.

Most of these kinds of disks are the result of old OEM disk formatters, but occasionally general disk corruption will trigger something like this.

I think most of the issues I ran in to were between DOS 2.x and DOS 3.x+ systems, because those versions determine disks geometry quite differently. But I have also seen some issues between DOS and Windows 9x/NT+ because later Windows assumes these variations will never happen.

TCPMeta

I've had floppies format as 720KB because the stupid floppy drive didn't detect the notch on the floppy disk.

Also I have ran into floppies that were compressed and when decompressed they never worked the same, even after reformating.

Floppies is one type of storage I do not miss.