6300+ and 1.44mg 3.5" drive

Shahrooz S. Alavi gr-ssa at cscraz.ncsu.edu
Fri May 4 12:20:15 AEST 1990


In article <1990May3.154440.16053 at uncecs.edu> acs at uncecs.edu (Wayne Fee) writes:
>
>
> I recently saw a posting in which someone requested info on how
>to get a 1.44mg 3.5" drive to work in a 6300+; I now need to know
>how to do this but I could find no response to the original poster
>on how its down.
>Background: 6300+, ATTDOS 3.3 and ROM ver 2.05
>Best I could do was get the 3.5" drive to format to 1.2mg; I tried 
>using DRIVPARM and even DRIVER.SYS but they were no help; DRIVPARM
>to me seems the obvious thing to use.  The drive switches on the 
>motherboard only seen to tell the machine whether or not it has 
>drives of 48TPI or 96TPI installed (I think that was all, I don't
>have the manual with me know).
>If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
>
>Wayne Fee, Academic Computing Services
>Appalachian State U.


	I am the person that posted the original note.  Unfortunately I
	have found no solution so far.  As you have mentioned It
	formats the floppy at 1.2 Meg, (which is readable by 1.44 meg
	drive on my PS/2 at work). Furthermore it reads and writes to
	1.44 flopies (formatted on another machine) This last one
	however is not exactly without help.  After installation, every
	once in a while when I tried to read / write to 1.44 Floppies I
	got a message such as "Can't find the sector " (or some
	nonesense like that) I had a program called SMAX which came
	with a public domain program called MAXI (which claims to be
	able to format disks at higher capacity that originally
	intended to, ie 1.6M on 1.44 etc., ) MAXI did not work on the
	6300+, but the bios patch (SMAX) made it possible to read/write
	to 1.44 floppy with no problem (but not format).  The drive as
	it is however can not read/write 720K floppies (with / without
	the patch)!

	Final Conclusion:  It is possible to read/write but not format
	1.44Flopies (unless of course someone writes a Bios patch /
	driver  of some sort, ANY VOLUNTEERS??? ) I suppose the right
	driver (patch) could enable the machine to do 720K.  How ever
	it is obviously NOT POSSIBLE TO USE THE 1.44 DRIVE AS BOOT
	DRIVE, you still need your 360K/1.2M drive for boot.


	-------------------------
	S. Alavi   (919) 467-7909



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