9/22/2023 0 Comments How to format a floppy disk in dos![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A different sort of "Extended Density" required a different type of disk media for the PC-DOS 2.88M format, used on high-end PS/2 models. An IBM Extended Density format supported in DOS 7 and OS/2 Warp 3 could get 1.68 MB or 1.72 MB on a standard high density disk (by using 21 sectors in 80 or 82 tracks) and was used for system software distribution, on disks whose first cylinder uses standard formatting to allow room for a README file accessible without support of this format (see Wikipedia article). This 1.44 MB format was the highest capacity floppy disk format in common use, but several higher-capacity formats also existed (but didn't catch on much) under the label "extended density". Users occasionally punched holes in low-density disks to attempt to use them in high-density mode, but this did not work very reliably the media was not designed for this. (This sort of incompatibility might, however, not have been as common as that between the high and low density 5 1/4" disks.) The drive could tell which type of disk was inserted because high-density disks had an additional punched hole on the upper-left corner (both high and low density disks used a write-protect hole in the upper-right corner of the casing (when seen from the label side) which could be opened or closed depending on whether you wanted to protect the disk from writing). High-density disk drives could handle both the new 1.44 MB format and the old 720K format, though there could be compatibility issues in reading 720K disks on low-density drives after they were written to with a high-density drive, even though the writing is done in an emulation of the old format, due to the different drive head on the newer drives. These disks were generally used with FAT12 file systems under the MS-DOS or PC-DOS operating system. It had 80 tracks per side, with 18 sectors per track, and 512 bytes per sector. The PC-DOS 1.44M format (3 1/2", double sided, high density) was the high-density counterpart of the PC-DOS 720K format for 3 1/2" floppy disks, storing twice as much data due to use of a different media surface capable of handling a higher density of data. ![]()
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