Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!ucla-cs!wales From: wales@valeria.cs.ucla.edu Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: 1.44Mb drive in XT clone -- followup (plus DRIVPARM bug?) Message-ID: <19363@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> Date: 6 Jan 89 23:55:48 GMT Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU Reply-To: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales) Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department Lines: 49 Thanks to everyone who responded to my earlier message asking about 1.44Mb/3.5" diskette drives in XT clones. I am now the proud owner of such a device. I am using a TEAC drive (FD-235HF) with a DTK controller. The controller has its own BIOS on the board, making it unnecessary to use special driver software or upgrade my system's BIOS. I also recently got my copy of MS-DOS 3.30A (the generic version, from Microsoft); this is the version that -- among other things -- fixes the DRIVPARM problem. I configured my system to accept the new drive as drive B by using a DRIVPARM line in my CONFIG.SYS. (Note: If you're about to comment that "DRIVPARM doesn't work, you must use DRIVER.SYS", let me repeat that I am using the newer version, MS-DOS 3.30A, in which the old "DRIVPARM doesn't work at all" bug has been fixed.) The drive works just fine for me; I have so far not run into any prob- lems at all. My system, in any case, seems to have very good I/O (it passes FASTBACK PLUS's "high DMA" test with the clock at the 8-MHz "turbo" speed) -- so I suspected from the start that I would not fall victim to the various reports of flaky behavior of high-density floppy drives in XT clones. However, I now seem to be running into another problem -- this time with the DOS FORMAT program. If I put a 1.44Mb disk into the drive and say "FORMAT B:", it only formats half the disk (tracks 0-39). I tried the following (probably more verbose than necessary) DRIVPARM line -- drivparm=/d:1 /h:2 /s:18 /t:80 /f:7 -- and rearranged the order of the parameters in several different ways, but the same thing would always happen. If, however, I give the command "FORMAT B: /T:80", everything works fine and I get all 1.44Mb of the diskette formatted. By the way, I initially tried the following bare-bones DRIVPARM line -- drivparm=/d:1 /f:7 -- and FORMAT only gave me about 1.2Mb on a diskette! (It formatted all 80 tracks, so I assume it used only 15 sectors per track as a default.) Has anyone else run into this kind of problem with 1.44Mb drives and MS-DOS 3.30A? Is there a solution? Am I doing something subtly wrong? -- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA wales@CS.UCLA.EDU ...!(uunet,ucbvax,rutgers)!cs.ucla.edu!wales "A monk, a clone, and a Ferengi decided to go bowling together . . ."