Formatting a Floppy ( Windows NT)

NTDEV
1

Hello All,
I am writing a soft. for increasing the size of floppy by formatting it to
more sectors (81).I did this on Win 98 system and it worked ,but it’s not
working under Win NT.I found Win NT is not allowing this.Can I format a
floppy to more size on NT ? How is it possible ?? Can I do it by writing
my own Driver for floppy drive ?? Or is there any intermidiate way ???

Thanx in advance.
Krishna

2

You would have to replace the floppy driver(s) in Windows … and then have
a floppy only your machine could use.

Besides, how can you increase the size of storage on a floppy by INCREASING
the number of sectors, when each sector incurs the same overhead for header
and trailer information? The last time I looked I believe every defined
sector on a floppy required in the area of 256 bytes to define the header
and trailer. Thus if you INCREASE the number of sectors, you effectively
decrease the bytes available for storage because you have more
header/trailer areas. You might DECREASE the number of sectors by increasing
the sector size and reclaiming some of those header/trailer areas, but now
you have a floppy that you can create but I can’t read because I haven’t
your driver(s).

–
Gary G. Little
xxxxx@broadstor.com
xxxxx@inland.net

“Krishna” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
> Hello All,
> I am writing a soft. for increasing the size of floppy by formatting it to
> more sectors (81).I did this on Win 98 system and it worked ,but it’s not
> working under Win NT.I found Win NT is not allowing this.Can I format a
> floppy to more size on NT ? How is it possible ?? Can I do it by writing
> my own Driver for floppy drive ?? Or is there any intermidiate way ???
>
> Thanx in advance.
> Krishna
>
>

3

It isn’t that hard to do.

  1. Modify floppy.sys or flpydisk.sys to handle your special requirements
    and create a new driver. I don’t recommend trying to replace the one
    Microsoft releases.
  2. Change the registry entry for the floppy driver to add an image path and
    point it to your driver, which should be in the drivers directory. Then the
    OS will load your driver and not the MS supplied one. The system file
    protection will not detect this change and you are good to go.
  3. Look on the internet for a description of the special high capacity
    floppies MS used to use for releasing software several years ago. It was
    about 1.6MB per floppy. They had one track in the normal format and a much
    higher density on the rest of the media. IBM also used it, but it was
    invented at MS. Some floppy drives and controllers couldn’t handle these
    floppies, but most could. I suspect even more will work today.

----- Original Message -----
From: “Gary G. Little”
Newsgroups: ntdev
To: “NT Developers Interest List”
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2002 11:49 AM
Subject: [ntdev] Re: Formatting a Floppy ( Windows NT)

> You would have to replace the floppy driver(s) in Windows … and then
have
> a floppy only your machine could use.
>
> Besides, how can you increase the size of storage on a floppy by
INCREASING
> the number of sectors, when each sector incurs the same overhead for
header
> and trailer information? The last time I looked I believe every defined
> sector on a floppy required in the area of 256 bytes to define the header
> and trailer. Thus if you INCREASE the number of sectors, you effectively
> decrease the bytes available for storage because you have more
> header/trailer areas. You might DECREASE the number of sectors by
increasing
> the sector size and reclaiming some of those header/trailer areas, but now
> you have a floppy that you can create but I can’t read because I haven’t
> your driver(s).
>
> –
> Gary G. Little
> xxxxx@broadstor.com
> xxxxx@inland.net
>
> “Krishna” wrote in message
> news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> >
> > Hello All,
> > I am writing a soft. for increasing the size of floppy by formatting it
to
> > more sectors (81).I did this on Win 98 system and it worked ,but it’s
not
> > working under Win NT.I found Win NT is not allowing this.Can I format a
> > floppy to more size on NT ? How is it possible ?? Can I do it by
writing
> > my own Driver for floppy drive ?? Or is there any intermidiate way ???
> >
> > Thanx in advance.
> > Krishna
> >
> >
>
>
>
> —
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