If iam going formatting 1.44mb floppys on this windows 7 pc its screws the sectors.. and i cant see any data on it when iam using it on older windows versions..

I've never had this problem, have you possibly got a faulty drive, or the heads are out of alignment?

I've successfully used Win 7 to format 1.44MB floppies as 720KB by sticking a bit of tape over the corner window. My Amiga could read these disks using dos2dos.

I use WinImage (I'm also running Win 7, 64 bit).

I tried different floppy drives, but the result it gets the same..

Try HD-Copy (http://www.asiawide.or.jp/HD_COPY.htm).

Maybe it is the pc zhat is busted

Yep. Never had that problem too. I used to format floppies in Win7x64 for use with my 486 and Pentium machines, when I downoad something and when I want to transfer these small files. I also use Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (among others) and I've even done this on my notebook, which also runs (among others) Windows 7 Ultimate x64, using a USB floppy drive. No problems there at all.

The DOS sectors in a floppy disk arrangement use common protocols in all OSs. Don't know why it's not working there. Try changing the floppy cable.

Robin4 wrote:

If iam going formatting 1.44mb floppys on this windows 7 pc its screws the sectors.. and i cant see any data on it when iam using it on older windows versions..

Is the disk formatted on that Windows 7 PC readable in other PC that has Windows 7 installed? Or if you run other OS on that Windows 7 PC that you used to format the disk, does the other OS reads the disk?

The drive on that particular 'Windows 7 PC' might be unaligned, so the drive formats and writes on the disk by its own alignment, which produces unreadable data on other drive because the data is not aligned according to the normal standard. Try replacing the drive, and see if the problem persists.

Dominus wrote:

Maybe it is the pc zhat is busted

That can be.. Iam not sure..

I tried that kouwell KW-530D in one if my 386 motherboards.. Then the card is working. When i try this controller in my XT machine it wont work with 1.44mb floppys..

So i made an dos 6.22 720KB boot floppy and an 1.44mb floppy.

With that 720KB boot floppy my XT machine will boot. Then tried to read out an 1.44mb floppy disk. But cant read it..

Does somebody has an scheme of that J2 section of this card..
I dont know which pin is pin 1 and so on..

Otherwise the onboard bios chip is bad...

How long could an c-mos be alive?

Thing i going to buy an eeprom reader.. I hope i can backup it in a good shape, so hoping i can flash it again on an new eeprom..

Like to have 1.44mb hardware support on my XT machine..

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KOUWELL ELECTRONIC CORPORATION

KW-530/KW-530D

Card Type Floppy drive controller
Floppy drives supported 360KB, 720KB, 1.2MB, 1.44MB
Data Bus 8-bit ISA

CONNECTIONS

Function Location

Diskette controller connector CN1

FLOPPY DRIVE CONTROL ADDRESS SELECTION

Address J2

Primary Pins 1 & 2 closed

Secondary Pins 2 & 3 closed

HARD DRIVE CONTROLLER STATUS REGISTER ADDRESS SELECTION

Address J2

1F7H (no hard disk controller Pins 4 & 5 closed
installed)

177H (hard disk controller Pins 5 & 6 closed
installed)

USER CONFIGURABLE SETTINGS

Function Label Position

» Factory configured - Do not alter J1 Unidentified

» Factory configured - Do not alter J3 Unidentified

» Factory configured - Do not alter RP1 Unidentified

» Factory configured - Do not alter RP2 Unidentified

1.2MB or 1.44MB drive installed in SW1/1 On
8086/8088 or 80286/80386 system

1.2MB or 1.44MB drive installed in SW1/1 Off
80286/80386 system only

» Factory configured - Do not alter SW1/2 Unidentified

Drive A is 360KB or 720KB SW1/3 On

Drive A is 1.2MB or 1.44MB SW1/3 Off

Drive B is 360KB or 720KB SW1/4 On

Drive B is 1.2MB or 1.44MB SW1/4 Off

Note: SW1/2 and SW1/3 only function when SW1/1 is in the On position.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well you can have HD floppy support on your xt, and it's very easy actually. I think I've mentioned that before somewhere here. I've done that on the same board. The problem is that the BIOS of the board is very old and doesn't support HD disks. All you need is a regular 16bit multi i/o card(that supports 1.44MB drives). On such cards, the 16bit part of the physical connector is used only for hard disk access. Everything else (floppy controller - serial and paraller ports) use the 8bit part of the card. So if you install a card like this, you just have to load a simple utility called 2MXBIOS. This is something like a bios extension. It takes only 2kb of memory, and after that you can read and write 1.44MB disks. The only drawback is that if your system doesn't have a hard disk, then your initial bootdisk has to be a 720kb one, so that you can load the program.

edit : that should also work with the floppy controller you have, as it seems to support HD floppies.

Yeah i know. But want the hardware option only..

I need to look at the bios of that kouwell controller.
Is it possible to dump the bios image? (in software modus) from that controller card?

Otherwise i need to go for an eeprom programmer.

You are sure your Kouwell Controller features an own BIOS extension?
Usually floppy routines are in the mainboards bios, so you would have to update those.

This is that controller card:

At the right you see the normal diskcontroller chip..
Above the 8 isa connector you see the bios chip.. It is been taped so it cant come in contact with UV light..

The eeprom says: PGM 12.5V

I cant get further on this.. I red about using an 16-bit i/o card on a XT machine en then using driver overlay software..

Is there maybe a sort of basic overlay software that can be possible be flashed to a rom chip?

Is there a program that could format 720KB (forced) on a 3.5 inch diskette? Something that works in older ms-dos and an XT class machine.

Tformat works great only on 1.44MB diskettes.

Have a look at ACs page about using 1.44 meg drives on XT class systems- https://sites.google.com/site/misterzeropage/
All you need to do is load a small tsr into the memory

I use HD FDD cards on my XT class systems

You can bye new HD FDD cards- https://monotech.fwscart.com/DeluxeFloppy_-_8 … 4_19478745.aspx

FDFORMAT I always found to be a very nice program that allows exotic floppy formats to be formatted.

the 2M-XBIOS.EXE referred to in CalUser2000 's link is for allowing reading&writing of HD disks when the Bios doesn't support the type (1.44M/1.2M)
Unfortunately for me, it doesn't work on my XT. Hangs the computer on load.

also.. normally dos FORMAT command also has a parameter /F:720 to format a DD disk.

weedeewee wrote on 2021-09-20, 22:13:

FDFORMAT I always found to be a very nice program that allows exotic floppy formats to be formatted. […]
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FDFORMAT I always found to be a very nice program that allows exotic floppy formats to be formatted.

the 2M-XBIOS.EXE referred to in CalUser2000 's link is for allowing reading&writing of HD disks when the Bios doesn't support the type (1.44M/1.2M)
Unfortunately for me, it doesn't work on my XT. Hangs the computer on load.

also.. normally dos FORMAT command also has a parameter /F:720 to format a DD disk.

Dos parameter i know off, but the floppy cant be formatted in dos due error.

Tformat also rejects the errors and just starting formatting again. Then the disk is then working fine again.

FDformat that worked.. Thank you, saved a floppy from the bin.