Turn 720k floppies to 1.44mb + more

Hey all,

Been going through some old floppies and putting stuff onto cd's for better storage and came across some modified floppies of mine.

Figured, while dated, would be a retro tutorial to have on AO.

How to turn a SD (720kb) floppy into a HD (1.44mb) floppy.

Basically, you take a 720 floppy, place it on the edge of a table,
Take a drill with a 5/8" drill bit (maybe smaller),
Place the bit on the little square on the top left corner,
(corner where the little flap is not)
Drill through the disk,
Then format the floppy as a 1.44! :thumbsup:

Voila! You made a 720 double it's size! :eek:

Now that's retro!

Also, there's a utility called FDFormat for DOS which will format your floppies to an even bigger size. You can format a floppy to 1.68 or even 1.72! (using the /168 or /172 switch)

Sure, this could have been useful information 6 years ago...
Sure, it might be a little pointless now...
Sure, it..... I'm not sure where I was going with this....

Anyways, that's the tut.

hehe, nice nice. I still use diskettes for fast little things etc.
I tried that FDFormat once, but with me it didn't work all the time... it failed most of the times when I wanted to put a file bigger then 1.5 mb on a diskette... maybe it's just me, but well like you said: I don't really need to store that much on a diskette because I have nice cd-rw's.

720 k disks still werent ment to hold 1.44 mb data, i believe you may run into many problems as you use these disks, then again i may be wrong

They werent meant to hold 1.44 mb, but most were made of the same material and with the same specifications as the 1.44 mb versions..
It's cheaper to manufacture 'm that way..

I remember doing that **** in like 1990 or '91..

When you say floppy are we talking about 5.25 floppies or 3.5? perhaps a picture or diagram for perfectly clear understanding would help....just a thought.

thanx tyger_claw... too bad i didn't know of this before CD burners were affordable.

I'm talking about 3.5" floppies

The 5.25" floppies were too soft to try something like that, as well as the max capasity was 720kb (or something along those lines...)

So the tutorial for 5.25 would be going from 340 (i think) to the 720.

Hope that helps. I'll take some pics of an old floppy if I can find one.... (a 720kb one)

*Edit: Uploaded an drawn image (quick) of what to do.)

Quote:

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Originally posted here by the_JinX
They werent meant to hold 1.44 mb, but most were made of the same material and with the same specifications as the 1.44 mb versions..
It's cheaper to manufacture 'm that way..

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I have a sort of indirect proof for that: I have 3.5" disks in Blue with the SD logo on them saying they are 720k and etc... while they have the 2 holes on the edge and are 1.44Mb. During manufacturing wrong label and colors got attached (or wrong hole-drilling?). This shows that they just produce one sort of disks and then afterwards choose some to be 720k and the others 1.44MB.

btw: the floppy sizes for the 5.25" disks where somethign along 360k, 720k and 1.2MB

Thanks Victor,

I had remembered about the 1.2mb size (for the 5.25") after I had posted and left home....

Nice info. Do you still have the floppy? Could you scan it and post it?

Btw, if both 720 and 1.44 are the same thing, why make 720?

Actually thats rather clever on their part -- release a 720k disk... then for a higher price, drill a hole in it and call it a 1.44 disk... hmmm

Beta to VHS anyone? lol
Reselling the same technology. :P

Yeah, but beta tapes were smaller then VHS tapes. (like 30%)

And, by knowing this trick, why would someone pay the extra 4$ for 1.44 when all you need to do is drill a hole? (Sure, you do get some saps....)

Quote:

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Why make 720k disks?

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- For instance cause some older equipment still (or did) use those disks. Many electronic music stuff used 720k floppies.

- Market strategy: product differentiation.

Tyger_claw -> I have a whole box of those "wrong printed" disks, I use them for specific purposes like Linux boot disks cause I can easily recognize them.

Can we make another whole to make 1.44 into 2.88?


Just kidding!!! but it may work

sorry about whole, i didn't mean to write it, the correct word is hole.

If you can find a 720k disc to try this on, it probably belongs in a museum.

I haven't seen any for sale in the last 6 years or so (although I have plenty of them - I am not tempted to try that trick though)