Re: And now for something completely different... etch!
On Tuesday 14 June 2005 02:32, Darren Salt <linux@youmustbejoking.demon.co.uk>
wrote:
> ISTM that a non-standard disk format (21 sectors per track and/or more
> tracks) would help - or would this just cause too many problems?
AFAIK it's not possible for the BIOS to boot from a 21 sector track.
I have heard of people formatting track 0 as 18 sectors and giving it the code
needed to switch to 21 sector mode for the other tracks. It's an ugly hack
and difficult to produce.
For floppy disks to be widely usable we want them to be writable on random
machines. In the past I've used Windows, DOS, and OS/2 machines to write
Linux disks. A disk with different numbers of sectors on different tracks
would probably only be writable on Linux.
21 sector track disks can be written on DOS and used to be writable on Windows
(not sure how they work with NT). Having an initial disk in 18 sector mode
that then loads from 21 sector disks might be viable.
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