Mail Archives: opendos/1997/12/10/14:19:15
By this I assume that you mean that "no" 8088 will operate a high density
drive no matter make or model?
Mark
On 1997-12-09 ben DOT jemmett AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk said:
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>>I have two questions. First, I have an old, old, old 8088. I
>>recently installed a 3 1/2 disk drive on it. 720K disks work fine,
>>but I get a "sector not found" error or "general error" when
>>trying to use 1.44 MB disks.
>Old, old, old 8088 - XT or previous, I assume. XTs and previous
>models can't handle drives above 720K - the data seperator on the
>FDD controller can't handle the data rates from 1.44 and 1.2 Mb
>drives - this is why you get sector not found errors, as the sector
>marks fly by too fast for the controller to spot them. This is
>certainly the reason Amstrad PC1512 and 1640's can't hack newer
>>drives, anyway. Using the /I switch on DRIVPARM is supposed to
>>install some sort of software driver to allow old BIOSes to access
>>1.44 MB drives. The /I switch is documented in DOSBook, but when I
>>actually add it in the CONFIG.SYS file, I get an error when
>>OpenDOS starts. What happend to the I switch?
>Don't know about the switch, but the drive is not handled by the
>BIOS, so a BIOS patch won't make your system compatible with high
>density drives. Sorry.
>Regards,
>Ben Jemmett
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