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Tandy formatted 3 1/2" disk

KK

KK

Lifer
We have some old equipment here at work that uses 3 1/2" disks that we believe are tandy formatted. Is there any way for an IBM PC to format it in tandy format? I tried just to format the disk as a 720k and that didnt seem to work. The original disk that we are trying to make a duplicate can be read via just using the regular way of looking at a floppy. But for some reason when I load the 720k formatted disk with what I copy onto the hard drive from the original, the equipment doesn't recognize the disk. So I'm guessing that the format is different. Anyone have any ideas?
 
put some scotch tape over the hole at the top and try to reformat. it's not the write protect hole but the other one. it'll trick the floppy drive into thinking it's a 720k disk.
 
Originally posted by: Shawn
put some scotch tape over the hole at the top and try to reformat. it's not the write protect hole but the other one. it'll trick the floppy drive into thinking it's a 720k disk.
Click to expand...

yeah, we did that to format it in 720 format, but I'm not sure if formatting it in an IBM PC is the same format that would be done via a tandy.
 
it should be the same. they both use MS dos right? i know that disks formatted on the old 5.25 high density drives were not backwards compatable with lower density drives but i don't think that was the case for the 3.5" disks.

did you try formatting the disk with the tandy computer and then copying data from the other computer onto it? it's possible that the drive itself is bad. i've had old drives like that die and still appear to function properly. they could copy data to a disk and be able to retrieve it but no other drive could. it's like the heads gets out of alignment.

edit: if all else fails you should be able to put the old drive into a newer computer and copy the data onto the disk that way.
 
Originally posted by: Shawn
it should be the same. they both use MS dos right? i know that disks formatted on the old 5.25 high density drives were not backwards compatable with lower density drives but i don't think that was the case for the 3.5" disks.

did you try formatting the disk with the tandy computer and then copying data from the other computer onto it? it's possible that the drive itself is bad. i've had old drives like that die and still appear to function properly. they could copy data to a disk and be able to retrieve it but no other drive could. it's like the heads gets out of alignment.

edit: if all else fails you should be able to put the old drive into a newer computer and copy the data onto the disk that way.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking that they don't use dos format and we don't have a tandy computer to use. If we did that would probably help. I don't know if we could somehow copy the disk image via the ibm pc, don't know if that would include whatever funky formatting the original has.
 
no clue. it appears they didn't use MS Dos but something that was supposedly "compatible". I found this googling. may be worth a read.


 
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