Last OS to support format/write/read 5.25 floppies? \ VOGONS

Last OS to support format/write/read 5.25 floppies?

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First post, by computergeek92

Posted on 2014-09-01, 04:37

computergeek92 Offline

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So it appears Windows XP does not support formatting 5.25 disks which is strange because the 1.2mb max size is not much smaller than the 1.44mb max of 3.5 disks. Does Windows 95/98 support format/write/read 5.25 disks since their design clings to ms-dos? Or should I just use a PC with Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11 to use 5.25 floppies?

I've also tried the freeware Omniflop, but when I used it to format dos 1.2mb and then selected my img file it would stop at 10% and stated something like "floppy write failed. operation was aborted." What could be causing this error? The 10% fail error was with an img file I made by creating a file, archive to zip, then renaming the extension to img. When I tried writing an img file I downloaded online, the write did not even start and I was presented with the same error message.

Any help is very appreciated, Thanks.

Dedicated Windows 95 Aficionado for good reasons:
http://toastytech.com/evil/setup.html

Reply 1 of 5, by smeezekitty

Posted on 2014-09-01, 05:56

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Windows 98 definitely can but I thought XP does too although I never tried it personally (only machines with a 5 inch drive are 486s)

Reply 2 of 5, by konc

Posted on 2014-09-01, 06:19

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Assuming that there is BIOS support, all OS's until windows 7 that I'm aware of can use 5.25 HD drives and format disks on them. The trick is that since XP, for everything else other than 1.44 disks you need to manually specify the parameters in the command line, like format x: /T:80 /N:15 if I remember this correctly.

Reply 3 of 5, by oerk

Posted on 2014-09-01, 10:26

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I think konc is correct. I had one working in XP. Never tried it with newer versions of Windows, though.

Reply 4 of 5, by pewpewpew

Posted on 2014-09-01, 13:39

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From the horse's mouth: Floppy disk formats that are supported in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309623

Badly worded, so dug into wayback and found a version before the current edit that makes clear what the current wording had intended:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070613231221/htt … t.com/kb/309623

Reply 5 of 5, by 2fort5r

Posted on 2014-09-01, 14:12

2fort5r Offline

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IIRC, 'three-mode floppy drive' is a Japanese design that treated the 3.5" disk as if it was a 5.25", producing disks that were logically identical to 1.2MB 5.25" but using the smaller more portable disk.

Account retired. Now posting as Errius.

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