From: Winniethepooh@100acrewoods.org   
      
   In article , Ken Springer  wrote:   
   >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.   
   >   
      
   TOS 1.4 i believe.   
      
      
   >My unconfirmed thought is there is something similar to an IBM formatted   
   >diskette.   
   >   
   >   
   >   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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