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From: rcp@moth.sw.mcc.com (Rob Pettengill)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: TEAC 3 1/2" 720 K floppy for XT
Message-ID: <3008@moth.sw.mcc.com>
Date: 15 Apr 91 19:04:47 GMT
References: <1991Apr14.205938.6817@unixg.ubc.ca>
Reply-To: rcp@moth.sw.mcc.com (Rob Pettengill)
Organization: MCC, Austin, Texas
Lines: 34

In article <1991Apr14.205938.6817@unixg.ubc.ca> cchen@unixg.ubc.ca (Chia-tung Chen) writes:
;
;Dear Usenet users:
;  I have some problem with the 3 1/2" 720 K TEAC FD-235F floppy drive on my
;XT that I hope some of you can solve. I use DOS V4.01 and driver.sys /d:1
;in my CONFIG.SYS to let the DOS recognize that this is a 720 K drive.
;
;  The problem I have is if I format a disk at home on this drive, I can only
;format it successfully under d:. That is fine, but whatever disks I format
;at home is not guaranteed to work on other machine at school. The machines
;at school at usually 386 machines with 1.44 meg drive. The machines at school
;either give me "FILE NOT FOUND" indicating there is no files on the disk, or
;"GENERAL FAILURE" indicating the disk is totally unreadable. However, the disk
;that I format at school generally have no problem when I bring it home. But, if
...

Part of your problem is that in additon to the driver.sys /d:1 you
also need a drivparm = statement in your config.sys.  drivparm takes the
same arguments as dirver.sys.  driver.sys installs a new driver (in
your case for a virtual drive mirroring you b drive).  drivparm on the
other hand modifies the parameters of an existing driver - in your
case this needs to be done for the b: 720k drive since the PC/XT bios
doesn't know about this kind of drive. 

Unfortunatly, IBM disables the MSDOS drivparm command in the PSDOS
versions of MSDOS.  In pcdos 3.3 I have had good luck with placing 4
control-a characters right after the = sign in the drivparm command -
I had trouble with this when I tried it once with pcdos 4.0.  Your
other alternative is to go with a generic Microsoft MSDOS 3.3 or 4.0.

It seems that IBM didn't want users to be able to upgrade their 360k
drives to 720k on the PC/XT.

;rob