DSHD Floppy Compatibility

[bluejay]

9 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

This is nuts... my current DOS PC only cost me $20 + $50 for the Sound Blaster 2.0 (ISA), $30 for the 1.2MB floppy drive and another $20 or so when I needed to replace the power supply. So around $120.

What computer is it?

When did you get it?

These two questions should explain how you got that pc for that cheap. Unfortunately, this is 2019 and MS-DOS computers are crazy expensive.

[DragonGrafx-16]

I bought it from someone on the vcfed.org forum. It was in a Tiger Direct case and had a Socket 7 board with an AMD K6 200MHz CPU in it and 32MB of RAM. I supplied my own drives that I already had.

[wierd_w]

I should go searching for a suitable old DOS machine.  I have some parts laying around the house still that I just could not bear to part with, like my old ISA AWE32. (No, it is not for sale.)

[mutterminder]

On 11/19/2019 at 9:01 AM, carlsson said:

To be honest, quite a few of the later Athlon XP and early Pentium 4 generation boards still had BIOS support for a 5.25" drive, at least 1.2 MB variety but sometimes also 360K so you don't really need a 90's PC, something from the beginning of the 2000's will support it too. I think it was with Athlon 64 and contemporary they dropped legacy support.

 

Operating system is another matter. DOS obviously works, so does Linux. You will be able to read and write disks of any capacity in Windows 98. Anything newer like XP only supports 1.2 MB and to add insult to injury, I have a memory that XP can only read, not write disks. Or at least it can't format disks any longer.

Actually I've found that even Windows 10 will work with pretty much any format.  I have been able to get my 2.88Mb ED Floppy disks to work by formatting them at the command line.  If you specify the number of tracks and sectors it works.  For instance Format A: /T:80 /N:36.   Once it's formatted at the command line, one can read and write to it from Windows.

 

Edited November 28, 2019 by mutterminder

[carlsson]

Cool. I never considered 3.5" disks of any capacity but I understand those went out of fashion not long after the 5.25" ones did.

[DragonGrafx-16]

3 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Cool. I never considered 3.5" disks of any capacity but I understand those went out of fashion not long after the 5.25" ones did.

Actually they were used  a decent amount of time until flash drives got cheap enough for the average person in the early 2000s. At least in my area.

[carlsson]

Yeah, "long" is a relative term. Mainly I was considering how many generations of operating systems support any form of floppy drives. Even Linux is phasing those out now, I read.