5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

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Alahndro
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Joined: Thu Jun 25, 2009 2:04 pm

5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by Alahndro »

Old hardware rocks!

I kept an old 5.25 floppy drive on the shelf now for at least 10 years and have dismantled and rebuild it several times. But 2 weeks ago I found a box with 10 floppies on the attic and was too curios if i can still read them.

First try was of course futile as now the drive is fubar. But by hocking it up to power and command it to spin endlessly i was able with the help of my osciloscope to recalibrate the head and the zero-track light switch.

I reconnect it to my lab pc and after just a half second it displayed me the content of the floppies. I went crazy when i read the timestamp of the files, they're from 1993. I then tried to backup the content off all floppies and could without any reading error. As iv'e said: retro hardware just rocks! I've got also some raw formatted ones missing any file system

Now to my question: will Reactos support to format them? and what must be done for XP to format them via context menu as it doesn't display any format options. It's only possible via cmd. I've heard that the geometries are disabled in windows since 2k, but can be re-enalbed somehow. Can you tell me where the settings/formatting options are stored in windows: registry, fsutil???.

Then I could even add additional prearranged images to be written to disk via the format dialog.
erkinalp
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by erkinalp »

Yes but new floppies cost about US$8.00 so it will be unnecessary to provide a floppy image except for RAM usage purposes...
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DOSGuy
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by DOSGuy »

It looks like you know that you can format 5.25" floppy drives using the command line. If "format /f:1200" doesn't work, you can just specify the geometry with /T for tracks and /N for sectors, i.e. "format /T:80 /N:15". Other than convenience, is there a reason why you're looking for a (possibly non-existent) registry setting to allow formatting the disks without using the command line?
erkinalp wrote:Yes but new floppies cost about US$8.00 so it will be unnecessary to provide a floppy image except for RAM usage purposes...
There's a place where you can buy new 5.25" floppies? :o Link please!

:Edit: Well I'll be darned. http://www.floppydisk.com/5point25.htm

I'm finding lots of websites that sell "new" floppy disks, when they're really NOS (new old stock) floppies from the 90s or even 80s. I would have a lot more faith in a disk that was actually manufactured recently. Does anyone still manufacture 5.25" floppy disks?
Today entirely the maniac there is no excuse with the article. Get free BeOS, DOS, OS/2, and Windows games at RGB Classic Games.
SomeGuy
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by SomeGuy »

Heck, I've been reading in some 5.25" disks from ~1983/84 recently!

It is really eye opening to see how far we have come - and in many ways how far we have regressed. (All the early 80s DOS software had you memorize goofy keyboard commands and running full screen. The Mac put an axe in all that, but Windows 8 insists on brining that crap back :roll: )

Yes, it seems early IBM PCs and clones have entered the "retro" stage right up there with the TI-99/4a, TRS-80, Apple IIs, and S100 bus systems.

And none of my ReactOS test machines happen to know how to boot from USB, so it is boot floppies for them.
Alahndro
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by Alahndro »

Yep, Convienience. And integrated functionality.

If you tick the "Build MS-Dos Startup Disk" all it does is writing a .bin image to the floppy. I could very well include many more images (HD repair floppy, Hardare diagnostic floppy, Network and CDrom boot floppy for pre-install of XP)

I want to do the same with 5.25 flopppies

And it's surely much easier than typing the long command into console.

So, can someone tell me how this format dialog works, which dll it's calling and how it detects the possible format options?
erkinalp
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by erkinalp »

The FreeDOS 1.x FORMAT tool does provide a way to overformat floppies using /F:[400,800,1360,1680,1743] so I think it is possible to allow ReactOS FORMAT to overformat floppies (both from CLI and GUI).
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PurpleGurl
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by PurpleGurl »

Keep in mind that most old floppy drives were 360k. The 1.2 meg drives were not as reliable and the compatibility between the two types of drives was limited. A 1.2 could read 360 fine, and obviously 360k cannot read 1.2 Mb. Now, you could format and write to 360k in a 1.2Mb drive, but the 360kb might not read a 360k disk from a 1.2 Mb drive (different head widths). If you really had to transfer data that way, then you'd have to try data recovery.

Oh, and there are other neat facts about floppies. With the right software, you could skew the format too. I usually set the Y value to 3 (at least on 1.44) when I had that option. With most machines, that made them read about 30% faster. That is similar to adjusting the interleave factor on older hard drives. I remember those days too. Some odd facts involved using XT hard drive cards on AT (286 and higher) class machines. One difference was the interleave. If it ran at 3:1 on an XT, optimum on a 286 would be 4:1, but a native AT card was best set at 1:1 unless the card was slow. I loved that about Spinrite. It was a recovery and test program designed for drives with data on them, and tested and set the interleave factor too. The other thing about using XT cards in AT machines was the boot address. You sometimes had to change the boot address to prevent conflicts.
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ingjki
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by ingjki »

Here, you can get help maybe. This forum / Club busy themselves with the conservation of old DDR-PC's, they worked exclusively with floppy .

KC-Club http://www.kc85.net/
KC85 Labor http://susowa.homeftp.net/
Robotrontechnik http://www.robotrontechnik.de/
Digital-AG http://9hal.ath.cx/usr/digital-ag/

MfG ingjki
Der Fortschritt lebt vom Austausch des Wissens. Der einzige Weg, der zum Wissen führt, ist Tätigkeit. - Albert Einstein -
SomeGuy
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by SomeGuy »

PurpleGurl wrote:Oh, and there are other neat facts about floppies. With the right software, you could skew the format too. I usually set the Y value to 3 (at least on 1.44) when I had that option. With most machines, that made them read about 30% faster.
Just out of curiosity, which of the formatter programs did you use?
erkinalp
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Re: 5.25 floppies and formatting them?!

Post by erkinalp »

SomeGuy wrote:
PurpleGurl wrote:Oh, and there are other neat facts about floppies. With the right software, you could skew the format too. I usually set the Y value to 3 (at least on 1.44) when I had that option. With most machines, that made them read about 30% faster.
Just out of curiosity, which of the formatter programs did you use?
Have you reduced sector gap?
-uses Ubuntu+GNOME 3 GNU/Linux
-likes Free (as in freedom) and Open Source Detergents
-favors open source of Windows 10 under GPL2
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