From: wordworks@greeleynet.com   
      
   On 9/23/11 4:34 PM, Dave Wade wrote:   
   > "Ken Springer"  wrote in message   
   > news:j5imj1$6dj$1@dont-email.me...   
   >> Maybe someone from Atariland knows or knows where the information is,   
   >> since we could read IBM/PC floppies...   
   >>   
   >> When the 3.5 floppy first appeared, in the PC world, if you had the right   
   >> drive and the computer's BIOS supported it, you could format a floppy to 3   
   >> densities, 720k, 1.2mb, and 1.44mb.   
   >>   
   >> You also had disks formatted by Windows95 and after, plus some disks that   
   >> were IBM formatted.   
   >>   
   >> I'm trying to find out the difference between the Windows format and the   
   >> IBM format.   
   >   
   > The only thing I can think of is long file name support. Windows floppies   
   > can have long file names as well as short ones ....   
      
   And both long and short names are still there.   
      
   >   
   >>   
   >> Why?  I need to upgrade the BIOS on an old Gateway computer, and the   
   >> instructions specify the floppy used *must* be an IBM formatted floppy. If   
   >> you use a Windows formatted floppy, the update will fail.   
   >>   
   >   
   > Apart from long file names the only other thing I can think of is that a   
   > Windows/2000, XP or later disk isn't normally bootable, but it there is an   
   > option to create a DOS boot disk in Explorer.   
   >   
   >> Anyone know/remember the difference?   
   >>   
   >> So far, asking the right questions in the right places in the PC world,   
   >> and Googling and Ask.com, have not come up with the answer.  :-(   
   >>   
   >   
   > I think that's because the question doesn't make sense.  Almost all "PC" and   
   > "ST" floppies are formatted FAT 16   
      
   True, but in the early versions of TOS, a floppy created by TOS cannot   
   be read by a PC until you manually change 2 bytes in the boot sector.   
   TOS wrote zeros, DOS and Windows put something else there.  There were   
   more than one little utility that would make that change for you, and at   
   some point TOS was changed to write the correct values into those two bytes.   
      
   My unconfirmed thought is there is something similar to an IBM formatted   
   diskette.   
      
      
      
   --   
   Ken   
      
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