Is there an easier way to format a floppy?

[sechs]

So, I was doing some closet cleaning and found a double-sided, double-density floppy which I used to use to cart around my Apple CD Player catalog when I was in college. Not being one to waste, I decided to reformat it and use it to hold the drivers for my RAID card, necessary for those pesky Windows reinstalls.

I go into My Computer, right-click on the drive, and choose format. The dialog pops up, and I click on OK. The format fails. I try again and get a bad track 0 message. Well crap.

Then I notice that Windows is trying to format the the disk as a 1.44MB disk. Ah, there's the problem. I go to the combo box to change it to a 720k disk, but there is only one option. I curse the interface designer.

So, I must resort to actually using the format command. First a try at a simple "format a:" leads to the same results. A check of help shows a "/f" command that should provide the option to choose the size of the disk. A go at "format a: /f:720" gives an "Invalid parameter" response. Perplexing.

A quick look at Windows Help and Support shows that the only valid size option is for 1.44, high-density disks. I curse Microsoft.

I must resort to specifying the number of tracks and sectors on the drive!

Having not done this in over a decade, I must do a Google search to find out how many tracks and sectors per track a 720k disk has. Finally, after ten minutes, I have the format started. And after a few minutes of grinding, I have 720k (minus 26,624 bytes in bad sectors) of space available for the 70.3k in drivers I want to put on the disk....

 

[ddrueding]

The easier way? Get a reasonably moder f*in floppy disk. Sheesh.

Floppys, like all cheap magnetic media, lose their ability to retain data over time. Floppys are the worst with zip disks slightly behind and tapes a healthy but still unnerving third.

Choosing to use an old floppy is a bad idea IMHO. At least you aren't storing vital data or anything. Just be sure the disk still has the files before you format.

 

[Mercutio]

XP has the ability to make a reasonably nice DOS boot disk.
Boot to DOS, and use the DOS format command to make your disk.

 

[jtr1962]

Even more stupid is that Windows can't even recognize, let alone format, some of the extended formats that let you get more on a disk. It can recognize the DMF (21 sectors per track) format, and can deal with non-standard numbers of tracks(some of my drives can do up to 86 tracks instead of the usual 80) but can't natively format it. It cannot even read multi-sector size disks at all like Linux can, let alone format them. By these I mean disks which are formatted with sectors of 4096, 2048, 1024, and 512 bytes in order to use more of the available space(up to the equivalent of 24 sectors per track). In short, Windows is very limited when dealing with floppies. Thankfully, with CD-RW and DVD-RW, plus assorted solid-state media, floppies these days are pretty close to obsolete except for starting a system in an emergency, and I've made bootable CDs that do that just fine.

BTW, whatever happened to that drive that formats a standard floppy to 32 MB? At least the disks would have had some use provided the drive was cheap enough (<$25).

 

[LiamC]

Yeah, I looked at those drives - but (at least here in Aus), they weren't cheap - AUS$240 v AUS$25 for standard floppy disk - and no one stocked them...

A Panasonic device if memory serves

 

[sechs]

The easier way? Get a reasonably moder f*in floppy disk. Sheesh.

Floppies are cheap and indispensible. The fact that they're extremely old and common *should* mean that they're easy with which to work. Why on earth Windows does not automatically recognise what kind of disk is in the drive is beyond me; why you cannot even choose the kind in the GUI is appalling.

 

[Tannin]

This is why I still have a DOS box in the workshop. It's .. er .. a Pentium MMX-200 with 32MB and a 1GB IBM SCSI drive, if I remember correctly, running PC-DOS 6.3.

Works a treat.

 

[sechs]

If I could get OS/2 to run all of my games, I'd be there.