First post, by Planet-Dune
Hello
I am formatting a few hundred "unknown" size 5.25" floppies. However I am running into something weird.. When I started most were 360kb (or a little less with bad sectors) but then it "switched" to 180kb (or less with bad sectors), I figured that was just because the floppy was a different format and pressed on. About 2 to 300 floppies later I decided to take a break and come back the next day. I was getting 360's right away which seemed odd to me.. after a couple of 360 it was a 180 again and then all 180's.. I then decided to reboot to test and reformatted the last 180 and suddenly it was a 360.. what is happening?
Things I notice:
I am using format.com in MSDos 3.30 (just the "format a:" command, no parameters)
When it does a 360 it goes slower
When it does a 360 the format status text changes all the time between "head 0" and "head 1", when it does a 180 it only displays "head 0"
In short, it seems to switch from 360 to 180 but once it is there it never switches back unless I do a full reboot.. now this is very annoying and slows me down a lot if I need to reboot every time (especially since the system has no HDD so I need to insert the MSDos 3.30 floppy everytime and then switch again to the to-format floppy).
Anyone know why this is happening and how to fix this? The worst part is this makes me doubt all those hundreds of 180's I formatted so far … well maybe a lot of those are 360 and I will need to start all over 🙁