IIsi with external 400k floppy possible? — #14

Post #14 by Aoresteen

Source Forum	68kMLA
Category	Troubleshooting
Post Date	Tue, 26 Feb 2008 - 20:38
Original URL	https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/iisi-with-external-400k-floppy-possible.12042/

Post

Sort of off topic, but the 5.25" disks made me remember this since I have an IBM PS/1 with both 3.5" and 5.25" high density drives...
If you use DOS, your disks will always be formatted to the highest capacity your drive is capable of (unless you use a really old version of DOS that doesn't recognize larger capacities). In other words, if you type format b: to format your 360K 5.25" disk, it will format it as a 1.2MB.

Yet another problem Macs of that vintage don't have...

Actually this is controlled by the BIOS where the type and capacity of the drive is stored. DOS simply gets the data from the BIOS (on POST it is stored in a Low Global). You can set a 3.5 1.4mb drive up as a 720K drive in the BIOS and DOS will treat it as such.