Great Hierophant
Veteran Member
The IBM PC could use 8-inch floppy disk drives. MS-DOS support 8-inch drives in the following formats
My questions are as follows :
1. Since there is no room in most PCs for an 8-inch drive, presumably these were in external enclosures. Could they connect via the DC-37 pin connector of a standard IBM Diskette Drive Controller or did they require a unique controller card?
2. There is no BIOS support for 8-inch drives in most PC BIOSes, so presumably you could not boot from these drives. Were there expansion cards with ROMs with BIOS extension code on them that would allow booting?
3. Did DOS require any special commands to recognize these drives? I assume not unless you did not have a BIOS extension?
Code:
# of Heads (Sides) 1 2 2
# of Cyls (Tracks) 77 77 77
# of Sectors/Track 26 26 8
Total # of Sectors 2002 4004 1232
# of Bytes/Sector 128 128 1024
# of Bytes/Cluster 512 512 1024
# Sectors/Cluster 4 4 1
Total # of Clusters 497 997 1227
# Reserved Sectors 1 4 1
# of Hidden Sectors 3 0 0
# Sectors/FAT 6 6 2
# of FAT Copies 2 2 2
# Root Dir Entries 68 68 192
Media Descriptor FE FD FE
Recorded Density Single Single Double
MS-DOS Version Began 1.00 2.00 2.00
Change-Line Support NO NO NO
My questions are as follows :
1. Since there is no room in most PCs for an 8-inch drive, presumably these were in external enclosures. Could they connect via the DC-37 pin connector of a standard IBM Diskette Drive Controller or did they require a unique controller card?
2. There is no BIOS support for 8-inch drives in most PC BIOSes, so presumably you could not boot from these drives. Were there expansion cards with ROMs with BIOS extension code on them that would allow booting?
3. Did DOS require any special commands to recognize these drives? I assume not unless you did not have a BIOS extension?