VOGONS


First post, by Cga.8086

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

DMF is a special format of 3.5" floppy disks used by Microsoft that stores 1.68 MB of data on a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk.
It was used for Os like win95 setup , office, etc.

i just found bunch of floppy discs from office97, (more than 25), its missing a bunch of them , so i wanted to reuse those and format them.
When i tried to format on windows 7 it just gave an error. like it erased the disk but was never able to complete the format, therefore the floppy now shows unformatted, and trying to format it just fails.

I want to know if there any tool transform/format a DMF floppy into a regular 1.44mb floppy.

Reply 1 of 3, by Deksor

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

Winimage can do that. But a USB floppy disk drive can't do that because due to cheap controller they can't do a full format.

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 2 of 3, by Deunan

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Is that x64 Win7? Try a 32-bit OS, preferably WinXP. Microsoft removed a lot of floppy support from their 64-bit Windows. I have a pretty decent USB floppy drive and I can do things like custom formats on WinXP just fine, but not on any modern systems. That being said, I've never tried this DMF format but AFAIK it's just more sectors per track, like we used to to do back in the day with 3rd party utils on DOS. If a PC FDC can read such floppies it should also be able to write to them and format as well. But, as Deksor mentioned, this is true for native controllers, the USB ones might be lacking and have some parameters baked-in the FW.

Reply 3 of 3, by brostenen

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Back in the mid-90's (1994/95) you were able to create those "strange" floppy format's, using stock floppy disks, for both Os/2-Warp and Win95. If you wanted to install the CD based version of those operating systems, on a computer that did not have any CD-Drive. Those disks that you have found, are physically just basic 1.44mb Floppy disks, that might just be of higher quality than stock disks.

I have noticed, that whenever I have formatted a 1.44mb floppy disk to 880kb Amiga format, then my USB floppy reader will not format them back to 1.44mb format. The issue is the controller that the drive is communicating through. In my case USB. So if you have access to an old 90's 486 based PC, then you are able to format those floppy disks. You can even use a Win98 based Pentium3 machine for all I know. Just not a completely modern machine, with the use of USB Floppy disk drives.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

001100 010010 011110 100001 101101 110011