From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Sep 7 23:15:15 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id XAA22476 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 7 Sep 1995 23:15:15 -0700 Received: from efn.efn.org (root@efn.org [198.68.17.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with SMTP id XAA22469 for ; Thu, 7 Sep 1995 23:15:14 -0700 Received: from garcia.efn.org by efn.efn.org (4.1/smail2.5/05-07-92) id AA00751; Thu, 7 Sep 95 22:09:07 PDT Received: from nike.efn.org (haus.efn.org) by garcia.efn.org (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA24492; Thu, 7 Sep 95 22:08:56 PDT Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 22:10:15 -0700 (PDT) From: John-Mark Gurney To: Jake Hamby Cc: "Don's FList drop" , Poul-Henning Kamp , "Christoph P. Kukulies" , freebsd-hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: higher density diskettes In-Reply-To: Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 7 Sep 1995, Jake Hamby wrote: > On Thu, 7 Sep 1995, Don's FList drop wrote: > > > > On Thu, 7 Sep 1995, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > > > > > > Microsoft has switched to using so called DMF format > > > > (Distribution Media Format - 1,716,224 bytes 1.63 MB) on > > > > diskettes for the WIN95 distrubution disks. > > > > > > This is very interesting. If it works for them, we can do that too. > > > The changes to the floppy-build procedure is rather few, but I still > > > suggest we hang in there until we hear how much trouble MS has with it... > > > > It's actually not a terribly new idea. I've seen utilities to format > > diskettes at slightly higher capacities for almost as long as I've had a > > PC. I remember 420k 5.25 floppy formatters....... > > This is a great idea, with one possible problem. Formerly, I used a program > called 2M to format disks to higher capacity but it required a TSR in order > to be able to READ the disks you had formatted. That meant that I > couldn't read the disks I had written on other people's computers! > The designer thoughtfully wrote a custom boot sector which allowed you > to boot from one of these disks and it would install the TSR > virus-like into the system so you could read the disk! Before that I used a > different program which required a device driver to read its disks. yeh... but the program I used would fit within the first 16 sectors so that you could just put the program on the disk and it would load when you run if from the disk... not bad a 2.5k loss of disk space... John-Mark gurney_j@efn.org Modem/FAX: (503) 683-6954 (FreeBSD Box) Live in Peace, destroy Micro$oft, support free software, run FreeBSD (unix)