Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 14

Thread: The lying floppy disk!

  1. #1
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Posts
    484

    The lying floppy disk!

    I'm trying to get LOAF onto a floppy and I should be able to, right? After all, the file is only 1.44 megs and both the brand new and recently formatted floppies claims to support just more then that.

    Except that, the disk doesn't seem to be big enough. In Explorer it shows up as having 1.38 megs free. And LOAF won't fit on that! Why won't my 1.44 file fit on my empty 1.44 disk??
    Why am I still here?

  2. #2
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    352
    u know how hard drives have formatted and unformatted differences in available space (i have an '8.4Gb' drive that is only 7.85 gig), im sure the same would apply to a floppy disk, probly the partition table or whatever its called taking up you lost 60 or so Kb, thats what my floppies always come up as so its not just you

  3. #3
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Posts
    484
    Well, whatever it is, its damned unfair and false advertising too. Oh well. Anybody know exactly why they steal 60 kb from you?
    Why am I still here?

  4. #4
    AO Curmudgeon rcgreen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2001
    Posts
    2,716

    Thumbs up

    A new 1.44 floppy with FAT12 format should
    hold 1,457,664 bytes of data. Of course, this depends
    on whether you have a few large files or many
    small ones, but with allocation units (clusters) of 512
    bytes, you shouldn't lose much to slack.

    You probably got a disk with bad sectors.
    I came in to the world with nothing. I still have most of it.

  5. #5
    Senior Member faust's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Location
    Chicagoland/Murphysboro
    Posts
    105
    This gives a break down of capacities for floppy drives. Basically you can only fit 1.39mb on a formatted floppy disk.

    http://www.pcguide.com/ref/fdd/format.htm

    But if you use a program like win image you can fit nearly 2 mb on a single floppy! I didn't know it existed until i had to backup my Win 95 program that came on 19 floppy disks!


    j.d.

  6. #6
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Sep 2001
    Posts
    535
    well they say that a floopy is of 1.44MB but then u don't get that memory to save...because some of the memory is eaten up by the sectors and partions on it which we make...when we format for the first time.....

    so that's it...what to do..
    A laptop, internet connection and beer.

  7. #7
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Posts
    677
    Hmm...
    MS-DOS (FAT12) formatted floppy disks have 1.38 MB space. Any 1.44 MB disk image should be written with a direct writing program (rawrite.exe is the usual one included with Linux distros for creating a boot disk from a disk image). Get rawrite.exe, and a floppy image for LOAF, and try creating the disk from the image, from the MS-DOS command prompt (its a DOS based program, although I have seen a windows version, I think it's included in Mandrake 7.1, but I'm not sure... I think the windows GUI version was called rawwrite.exe (extra 'w')).
    One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them.
    One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
    (The Lord Of The Rings)
    http://www.bytekill.net

  8. #8
    AO French Antique News Whore
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    2,126

    Unhappy Compagnies thing 1000 byte = 1 KB

    Usually when companies sell floppy or hard drive, they write 1,44 MG but in their mind, it mean 1 440 000 Bytes so since a KB is 1024 Bytes. So floppy are not 1,44 MG like they claim but realy 1,37329 MG. It's the same thing with hard drive. A 40 GO Hard Drive is in reality a 38,146 GO Hard Drive. .

    Try compressing the disk (Only work if you use the OS to read the floppy back) or zipping your date?
    -Simon \"SDK\"

  9. #9
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Posts
    385
    yet another case of hardware vs. software vs. usable space. Why can't we just agree on one standard?
    oh yeah, that would be to easy.
    oh well
    Preliminary operational tests were inconclusive (the dang thing blew up)

    \"Ask not what the kernel can do for you, ask what you can do for the kernel!\"

  10. #10
    Banned
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Posts
    1,459
    Files have different file sizes on disk.... For example explorer.exe on my Win2k box is 237k but on disk its 240k..... It might be that the file is a little bigger then it actually says. Hope this helps out

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •