forcing format for 3.5 floppy disk 1.44 mb

A 1.44M disk has a different magnetic surface to a 720K disk, and if you want to push out 1.44M of data you have to write it to a 1.44M disk. The presense or absense of the second hole determines the magnetic strength used by the drive head. It did seem to me that if the floppy companies & PC makers had actually adopted them wholesale, the floppy disk as a medium might have survived for considerably longer. The BBC cannot push data out fast enough to write 1.44M data (though there have been successes with hardware tinkering and self-interupting interupt routines - there was a detailed thread some years ago with loads of fancy cycle counting and osciloscope traces). It is the floppy controller in the computer that determines the data rate, not the drive. What about the drive itself does this need to be an early 720k PC drive or will a 1.44MB drive work (but just with DD disks)?Ī 3.5' drive is a 3.5' drive is a 3.5' drive.

Please excuse the dumb question, so we can only use DD/blue 3.5' disks. They *MUST* be DD/blue/single-hole disks. As per comments above, you *CANNOT* use HD/black/two-hole disks with 8-bit Acorn machines.

Forcing format for 3.5 floppy disk 1.44 mb