Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!nosc!crash!pnet01!jca
From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: I think I found how to write 360K on AT 1.2M drives
Message-ID: <691@crash.cts.com>
Date: 11 Nov 89 20:56:44 GMT
Sender: root@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 41

iiitsh@cybaswan.UUCP (Steve Hosgood) writes:
>I discovered that I could write 360K reliably on *one* of our ATs at work but
>not on another. Both had NEC drives, an FD1155C which wrote the 360K disks OK,
>and an FD1157C which didn't. So I swapped the drives from one machine to the
>other. The effect stayed with the *machines*! Now the 1157C wrote 360K disks
>and the 1155C didn't. So I swapped the controllers. Still the effect stayed
>with the machines!
>
>I started to suspect the BIOS. The machine that could write 360K disks had a
>CAC-AMI (?) BIOS, the other had an AWARD 3.01. I discovered another machine
>in our office had an AWARD 3.03, so I swapped BIOS ROMs over.
>
>The fault vanished! I then discovered that the machine with the AWARD 3.03
>had been able to write 360K disk all along, using a TEAC FD556FR drive,
>so it definately seems that with the right BIOS, just about any drive can
>write 360K.
>
>So scrap your AWARD 3.01 and get something better! Is 3.03 the latest, or
>has anyone seen a 3.04? There is still a bug in AWARD 3.03, in that
>the soft reset doesn't work properly. If you use RAMDRIVE it gets left in
>limbo by the CTL-ALT-DEL sequence, and doesn't come back up. Hard reset
>works OK (on RAMDRIVE 1.19 anyway).

My 16 MHz AT has been able to read/write to 360K disks with 1.2 Mb drives all
along.  If you have Phoenix BIOS 286 Plus 3.10 you don't have to worry, it
knows what 360K format is.
 
I never did like the Award BIOS, now I have a justification as to why.

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