Mail Archives: opendos/1999/04/14/21:01:08
On Wed, 14 Apr 1999 17:59:13 +0100, Matthias Paul wrote:
> A long while ago, on Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Ray Greene wrote:
>> I have come across a driver called ZapA that will let you access and boot
>> from a Zip drive as though it were a floppy drive - the Zip drive becomes
>> a: or b: - at http://www.blueskyinnovations.com
>> However, it says that MS-DOS will only recognise up to a 32Mb floppy drive,
>> which is a waste of a lot of Zip disk space.
>> Can anyone tell me if OpenDOS has the same 32Mb limit for floppy drives?
I can't remember if I sent a reply to that question or not,
so here goes.
I tried ZapA and it works perfectly with OpenDos v7.01
The entire 100mb 'is' accessible just as if you had a 100mb floppy.
> As others have already answered, DOS assumes floppies to be FAT12,
> which explains the 32 Mb limit. However, there is also another
> limitation, the maximum count of sectors per track. DR DOS tools like
> FORMAT, DISKCOPY, and DISKCOMP will (currently) support a maximum of
> 36 sectors per track for removable floppy-like media, since this is
> the sector count of 3.5" extra-density (ED) floppies (2.88Mb/4Mb),
> which, however, failed to get a larger acceptance. This is due to
> code allocating memory for track buffering.
Very good point Matthias.
So, for anyone who gets ZapA, don't use any of these DOS utilities
to format, diskcopy or diskcomp the ZipDisk.
Use the utilities that came with ZipDrive.
--
Glenn McCorkle mailto:glennmcc AT cisnet DOT com
North Jackson, Ohio, USA
Arachne, The Web Browser for DOS
Open the 'DOOR' to the WWW. Keep the 'windows' closed.
http://home.arachne.cz/ or http://arachne.browser.org/
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