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From: roy@gitpyr.UUCP (Roy J. Mongiovi)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Formatting non-standard diskettes?
Message-ID: <449@gitpyr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Jun-85 16:17:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: gitpyr.449
Posted: Tue Jun  4 16:17:05 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Jun-85 02:59:46 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Lines: 23

I'm looking for info on how to determine the parameters necessary to
format a diskette with other than 8/9 sectors per track on the IBM PC.
DOS 1.1 supported 320K floppies with 8 sectors per track, DOS 2.0+ now
supports both 8 and 9 sector tracks.  There seem to be three relevant
values in the disk parameter block:

						DOS 1.1.	DOS 2.0.
						 value		 value

block+4		number of sectors per track	   8		   9
block+5		read gap length			   42		   42
block+7		gap length for format		   80		   80

In other words, they stuck one more sector per track without changing the
gap size.  How in the world does that work?  Also, I know that J-format
from tall-grass (?) can format a 10 sector track.  What values are needed
to do that?  In general, how do you determine these values?
-- 
Roy J. Mongiovi.	Office of Computing Services.		User Services.
Georgia Institute of Technology.	Atlanta GA  30332.	(404) 894-6163
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