NFORMAT! tool, that I mentioned earlier here

aVd wrote on 2026-06-20, 05:31:

NFORMAT! - this tool helped me to save a tons of "damaged" floppy diskettes with magnetically "bad sectors".

has all the settings needed for floppy disks "overburning" and formatting in non-standard formats:

It has a super simple and fast TUI interface and it does its job perfectly fine. The only drawback - it comes without build-in standard DOS format profiles for 5.25" diskette drives, but this could be easily corrected by adding user profiles with all the settings needed.

Nformat was great along with DaveDDS Imagedisk utility of course. Nformat was easiest to use and it allowed great modifications to all the lax, standard values to increase capacity.

But there were also a couple more oddballs like 188.exe which claimed to be able to format a 1.44 floppy to 1.88M. I never got it to work. And there was the Microsoft DMF standard which put 1.68M on a 1.44M floppy using 21 sectors per track. I remember Win 95 was shipped on DMF 1.68M floppies.

And the author of 2M, Ciriaco García de Celis, with whom I communicated fondly with back in the 1993-95 period, also released a utility called 765debug with the 2M package which allowed one to test floppy drives to very fine detail and standards of precision.

zyzzle wrote on Yesterday, 01:38:

And the author of 2M, Ciriaco García de Celis, with whom I communicated fondly with back in the 1993-95 period, also released a utility called 765debug with the 2M package which allowed one to test floppy drives to very fine detail and standards of precision.

interesting I will have to look for this.

winimage could do some weird high capacity formats. but it's a windows app, obviously.

zyzzle wrote on Yesterday, 01:38:

Nformat was great along with DaveDDS Imagedisk utility of course. Nformat was easiest to use and it allowed great modifications to all the lax, standard values to increase capacity.

But there were also a couple more oddballs like 188.exe which claimed to be able to format a 1.44 floppy to 1.88M. I never got it to work. And there was the Microsoft DMF standard which put 1.68M on a 1.44M floppy using 21 sectors per track. I remember Win 95 was shipped on DMF 1.68M floppies.

And the author of 2M, Ciriaco García de Celis, with whom I communicated fondly with back in the 1993-95 period, also released a utility called 765debug with the 2M package which allowed one to test floppy drives to very fine detail and standards of precision.

Hi, @zyzzle,
This m$ DMF format can be easily created with tools like NFORMAT! or ImageDisk (IMD) and WinImage also supports it. DMF main format parameters can be found in wikipedia article and also here: https://winimage.com/wimushlp/wini1a1y.htm

I found 765DEBUG version 5.0 and its source code here: http://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/drivers/Central%2 … bleuge/765debug

Thanks for mentioning this tool.

It will be even nicer, if download links or URLs are given, when something not so popular is suggested.