Greg Mayman wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 -=> Roy J. Tellason said to Greg Mayman
 -=> about "SILICON CHIP ON LINE" on 05-20-04  04:06.....

 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 I 
 RJT> 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 a 1.2M
 RJT> floppy drive,  so unless I want to figure out a way to make one of
 RJT> those out of a 1.44M disk,  and then figure out a way to restore the
 RJT> settings,  and reboot,  I'm not going to bother.

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

You *can* format a "1.44" as 1.2MB,  and it'll work if the system
is expecting such,  but things sure could get confusing if you try and put
that into another drive or if the system isn't set up correctly.  Maybe
I'll try it one of these days and see how well it works...

 GM> If you chase around you should find someone who still has some
 GM> 5-1/4" HD disks.

Oh,  I have some here,  it just didn't seem worth the bother.  I have one
in _this_ machine,  AAMOF, though I don't recall the last time I used it.

 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.

There isn't a 5.25" drive in there,  it doesn't do any hardware test, 
and the default is apparently hard-coded into the BIOS.

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