Hi Greg.

26-May-04 08:38:00, Greg Mayman wrote to Roy J. Tellason



 RJT>> These are what,  dos programs?

 GM> Yup.

 GM> I probably have several such in the
 RJT>> files section here.  But that's not the issue,  anyhow.  How am
 RJT>> I going to get one of those to run?  If the machine loses power
 RJT>> long enough to lose settings,  it's not gonna boot,  and I'm not
 RJT>> going to be able to fix it except by hooking up a keyboard and
 RJT>> monitor to it...

 GM> Yes, there probably isn't any easy way out of that.

 RJT>> This MB won't even do that -- if it loses CMOS,  the default is
 RJT>> a 1.2M floppy drive,  so unless I want to figure out a way to
 RJT>> make one of those out of a 1.44M disk,  and then figure out a
 RJT>> way to restore the settings,  and reboot,  I'm not going to
 RJT>> bother.

 GM> A 1.2m disk is a 5-1/4 inch high density floppy. You won't make
 GM> one of those out of a 3-1/2 inch disk unless you can squash it out
 GM> a lot bigger. like making a pizza base.

here's how.

stick a formatted 1.44 in drive A (3.5")
and a formatted 1.2 in drive B (5.25")

c:\>  debug
-     l 100 1 0 1
-     w 100 0 0 1
-     q
c:\>  diskcopy b: a:

there's another way that doesn't involve a 1.2 meg drive but it needs a
copy of a 1.2 bootsector, and another that involves editing the boot sector
of a 1.44 meg drive... but the above is the easiest to remember.

now you've got a 1.2 meg formatted 1.44 floppy that cam be made bootable
and will boot in a 1.44 drive when the bios thinks it's 1.2, it'll also
work with correctly configured CMOS.

 GM> Otherwise, physically remove the 5-1/4" drive and fit a 3-1/2".
 GM> That should make the comp default to a 1.44M after its hardware
 GM> test.

I've seen that not happen.

 -=> Bye <=-

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