4 floppy disk drives on a PC?

[Jim Leonard]

Tony Duell wrote:
> I'll stick my 5.25" MFM (PC, essentially) disk FAQ at the end of this 
> message. You (or anyone else) is welcome ot make use of it in a more 
> comprehensive FAQ provided you give me an acknowledgement.

Very nice, and I'm glad to see you came to the same conclusion that I did (that 
if you bulk erase, format, and write to a 48 tpi disk in a 96 tpi drive as a 48 
tpi format, it should be readable in 48 tpi drives as long as it is not written 
to by the 48 tpi drive.

Another piece of information possibly worth noting is that my AT&T PC 6300 (the 
US rebranded version of the Olivetti M24) shipped with remarkable drives that, 
in addition to being 99% silent, were servicable as both 48 tpi and 96 tpi 
drives (these were NOT high-density 1.2MB drives, but rather 360K drives that, 
through a dip switch on the motherboard, could reliably put 80 tracks on a 
normal DSDD 40-track disk).  I'm not sure if the support to do this came from 
the drives or the motherboard BIOS, but I was initially overjoyed to see that I 
could get 720K on disks that were meant to hold 360K.  I say "initially" 
because I found that when set to 96 tpi, they could no longer read 48 tpi 
disks!  I didn't like the idea of being forced to convert the formats of every 
diskette I owned so I never pursued it beyond a few fun tests.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)                    http://www.oldskool.org/
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