Modifying A 3.5 Floppy Disk ?

[Xzaver]

Is it at all posible to Litteraly Modify a 3.5 floppy disk to make it a larger disk ?

Also....

What's This all About ?

Regards,
-Xzaver-

 

[CalebTG]

That will require the new 240mb superdisk drive

right now, if you toy around, you can get up to 2mb off of some floppies

 

[jfall]

I use to do it back like 5 years ago.. I can't remember what I did.. but it involved drilling a hole in the disk.. you can also get software that will make them about 2 megs.. but you need the software to read it, I think..

 

[TerreApart]

There used to be a floppy drive that held 2.5 megs... It died quickly tho.

For a normal 1.44 floppy you can format it to 1.7 with some special software(i may still have it if i look). Microsoft used to use this format on floppy-disk versions of Office 4.2 and 4.3(20 and 24 disk versions). A normal floppy drive can still read and write the disk using this 1.7 format also...

NOTE: drilling the hole is how people increased a 720k floppy to 1.44mb, this was not always reliable tho.

 

[GammaRayX]

I believe that the program to format a diskette to more that standard capacity is fdread and 2mf. Both also have its source code avaliable.

fdread can format upto 1.72mb, and can go up to 1.6mb that can be read on a floppy w/o using its driver.

2mf can format upto 1.9 but must need its own driver to read those disks.

Another aspect of 2mf is 2mgui, which can format upto 2.0mb on a standard floppy drive. Upto 4.0mb on a 2.88mb extended flopp drive.

Its the ED format that holds upto 2.88mb on a floppy, but the format never caught on because the media is too expensive.

 

[GammaRayX]

Almost forgot, you can get those utils here. Thou I don't know of any reason why someone will still want to use the floppy drive, or even go through the hassle just to get an extra 33% out of a floppy.

 

[Zenmervolt]

A 1.44 HD floppy holding 32 MB?! What are those guys at Matsushita Electronics smoking? Given my experience with re-formatting 1.44 MB disks to 2.88 MB (I have some old PS/2's with the IBM 2.88 drives) has been that those things fail at a rate of around one a week, and I use good Verbatim diskettes. Plus, you format that disk to 32 MB then you cannot use it on any computer without an LS-240 drive, it becomes just as useless as an LS-240 disk as far as universal compatability is concerned. Best off just to archive large files on ZIP 250 or ZIP 100 because of the user base, with ATAPI ZIP 250 drives coming standard or as an option in a lot of computers I really cannot see an attraction for the LS-240 drives.

Zenmervolt

 

[Noriaki]

Floppy disk? What's that?

PacketCD formated CDRW is the only way to fly

 

[jamarno]

I don't see how it can be modified except by making it spin slower to pack more bits per track, but it's probably easier to just use a 2.88M controller and make it think that the 1.44M drive is a 2.88M.

The trick of drilling a hole in a 720K floppy to turn it into a 1.44M isn't reliable because compared to a 1.44M floppy a 720K has a magnetic coating that's about twice as thick with particles about twice as big but otherwise magnetically about identical. That's why 1.44M floppies are transparent when held up to light (as are 5.25" 1.2M floppies) but 720K floppies aren't (neither are 360Ks).

Fry's has advertised solid state memories that fit into a 3.5" floppy drive and provide 30 or 50 megs of storage, but I've never tried one.

 

[chiwawa626]

I remember my dad used to work for bank of america and he used to bring disks home somtimes, they were branded back of america and were 2.88mb, and worked in a standard floppy drive