On 3/3/06, Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO <brian.kelsay@kcc.usda.gov> wrote:
So the more important question to you was, can I trust a floppy
formatted to more than the standard 1.44MB? I say yes. I have done it.
I ran a firewall off one with Freesco for something like 2 years. If a
floppy isn't going to work in this mode, you find out real quick when
you try to format it and use rawwrite to put the .img file on it. I've
had success with a ton of floppies, just not the ones with the cheapy
plastic slider. Even some recycled AOL and Earthlink floppies made good
Linux boot floppies.
The other questions I think have been answered.
Don't forget that FAT12 isn't the only formatting method for floppies. The unformatted capacity is 2MB, but the design of the DOS file system takes up a lot of space for recordkeeping. I know back in my Amiga days we had HD
3.5" disks that were run at 1.72MB, IIRC. The Amiga used FFS, even on floppies. It was more space efficient. So, you can make a larger floppy just by using an alternative filesystem. It shouldn't matter for booting, as the boot blocks can be programmed to read whatever file system you want, of course. ;)
Jon.