Thread: Floppy Media Problems

The 360KB disk has only 40 tracks with nine sectors per track divided across the surface of the disk. The 360KB tracks are the widest of any disk mentioned in this chapter. The 360KB floppy drive heads rest in the middle of the tracks to read and write the Is and Os. On the other hand, the 1.2MB floppy drives have much smaller read/write heads. The 1.2MB disk has 80 tracks and 15 sectors per track, allowing it to store more data.

The 1.2MB disk also has a coating of a different magnetic material. The smaller 1.2MB read/ write heads can read the big Is and Os the 360KB disk has written to it. However, when you write information to a high-density disk with a 1.2MB drive, it has two tracks of data for each track on a 360KB disk. Floppy Table 2 summarizes this information.3.5" drives are a different since all the read/write heads in it are of the same size. The disks have a different coating and each capacity type has a different number of sectors per track: nOKB disks have 9 sectors per track, 1.44MB disks have 18 sectors per track, and 2.88MB disks have 36 sectors per track. Each time you format a disk, the operating system tries to format it to the highest capacity, unless,



(11) You tell DOS otherwise through the FORMAT command switches or through the Windows format window. or

(2) You have a floppy drive with a sensor that detects what type of disk has been inserted. This is why 3.5" disks have the windows on the right side of the higher capacity disks.

Some floppy drive manufacturers make floppy drives without the sensor. The disk does not get the Is and Os written properly causing data errors. The easiest way to determine the floppy drive capacity is to go into the computer's Setup program and look at the configuration.