Formatting floppies in 1.68 Mb

Shamshi-Adad

Hello, there!

I've been lurking around the WinWorld website for few months now, as I'm gathering a little collection of ancient IT things (laptops from the 90's, mostly), and a great part of the fun is to make them nearby as functioning as they were!
Then, I started to sift through Google in order to find everything that these old machines could use : drivers, software, OS...

The WinWorld archive is just incredible. My main, actual computer is slowly transforming in some kind of second storage for all this great vintage things you got there.

However, for floppy versions (3.5", I haven't tried the bigger things yet), I'm facing an issue for OS images. Windows 95, for example, is mostly stored on... 1.68 Mb floppies, something that I discovered very recently.

I'm barely old enough for having known the period when 3.5" were still of use.

Indeed, I tried to google and regoogle that, again and again, but the few tips I managed to find out there revealed unusable (missing software, missing many many many leads to use the software properly...).

Well, it's not a very important issue, actually. I often copy the Windows 9x files directly to the old computer hard drive to install it. But it would still be good to know if there is still a proper way to reformat a floppy on something bigger than 1.44 Mb.

If anybody had an idea...!

By the way : I'm sorry if a similar question has already been asked before. I tried to search the forums before posting, but if there's something yet, I was unable to figure it out.

stitch

Welcome to WinBoards and thanks for a great first post.

Use WinImage: http://www.winimage.com/wimushlp/wini1a1y.htm

In a nutshell it uses this DMF format that squeezes an extra track out of the floppy disk. There's usually enough material on a standard 1.44MB formatted IBM floppy to allow for this but that's not always the case. Being a major source of floppies Microsoft at the time was in a position to be able to order disks to work wtth it. Cheap old floppies probably won't though. It also relies on BIOS to do the calls so your mileage can vary there.

SomeGuy

Actually, DMF uses more sectors, not tracks.

But there were some other formatters that would make use of a few extra tracks.

One of the bigger issues early on was BIOS compatibility, but a good chunk of the DMF stuff was for OEM distribution, where OEMs could guarantee compatibility with there machines.

But yea, WinImage should be able to write all DMF images on this site, as long as you have a real floppy drive. Most USB floppy drives barf on DMF (and 720k).

TCPMeta

                               1440 kB	                   DMF
Tracks	                80	                           80
Sectors per track	18	                           21
Cluster size	        512 bytes	                  1024 or 2048 bytes
Root directory entries	224	                          16

There's also a DOS program called 2M that can format floppies to a higher capacity. Another one I use to use a NFORMAT.

Here is a link on more information on the subject. FYI most of it is Linux jargon but if you can understand it then it is a shoe in for Windows.
http://www.trevormarshall.com/byte_articles/byte19.htm

Shamshi-Adad

Thanks a lot for your answers!

I already crossed the path of WinImage for writing usual 1.44 Mb images, but as it was shareware, I forget it quickly. However, if it reveals to be a good tool to format in another sizes, let's try this!

Hm, I'm actually using a Dell internal floppy drive... as a USB external one. It's an "ultrabay" like module that also has a mini-USB plug on it's side.

Do you think I should set WinImage on a computer that is equiped with a true internal floppy drive?

Well, I just tried to format and write the 1.68 Mb image while typing this post : it shows me a Windows error at the very beginning, it writes of an "Error N.50 Access Denied". I tried to only format it on 1.68 Mb before writing, but the same occured.
The next floppy I tried showed me "The current image format is not supported by the disk drive".
The next came back to the first error.

After few tries, it appears that the same floppy can display the two different errors, randomly.

I'm afraid the USB really won't do the trick. Or maybe could it come from my floppies ? Two of the five I tested are labelled as "double side high density, 2.0 Mb". And they are functioning otherwise for writing ordinary data.

I'm gonna google a little about these errors.

TCPMeta, thanks for this other hint!
I'm not used at all to Linux things, but I'll read that and see if I can figure it out.
I think I tried NFORMAT, but as it's wrote on the webpage, I remember some problems for running it even on DOS emulators. However I should give it another test, I level uped my DOSbox ability since then, haha.

SomeGuy

Formatters in general don't run or do much under emulators. Most emulators don't fully emulate floppy disk controllers, and always assume a "standard" 1.44mb, 1.2mb, 720k, or 360k image size. And in this area, DOSBox is probably the worst.

The one exception that comes to mind is PCE, it can do incredible floppy emulation when using its flux and sector file formats.

The USB issues are due to the fact that all of the floppy controller logic is in the drive itself, and must translate all the oddities of a floppy disk in to a simplified USB block device.

TCPMeta

I only have a few issues with my cheapy Dynex USB floppy drive. Mostly works in Linux when it comes to writing images.

Shamshi-Adad, that "Error N.50 Access Denied" sounds like you were running WinImage as a standard user. Try running it as Administrator.

Shamshi-Adad

Thanks for these new answers!

Well, I tried again on this USB drive, while running WinImage as Administrator, but I had the same error again.

I'm wondering of it could have some links with my 64 bits version of Windows 7?

I think I'll try to run WinImage on another PC with an internal floppy drive and a 32 bits Windows XP.

I'll try the other tools you told me about too, but it will surely take longer, the time to get familiar with those!

ibmpc5150

I figured out that the following tools seem to support to initialize disk as DMF (1.68MB) size.

*2M
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

*FDFORMAT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fdformat

*NFORMAT

I use FDFORMAT utility mainly.

1) FDREAD <-- CPU : 286 or higher
or FDR88 <-- CPU : 8088

2) FDFORMAT A: T:80 N:21

(Unfortunately 800 II can't support DMF format.)