Dumb question time! (By the way, this is not for my Packard-Bell, it's for a "Coastline" IBM clone) Do I have to set a jumper on a 3.5" floppy drive to make it able to format to 2.88? I tried telling the computer to address it as 2.88, but when formatting disks, I get a message that media-type (is) invalid or sector not found. These are the same floppies that format normally in the 1.44 drive. What's the scoop, anyone? Thanks in advance!

If you don't have 2.88 floppies, you just can't do it. They used to exist but I haven't seen any for years...they weren't very popular. Skip

In addition to Skip's comment, why would you even be interested? I like to include A drives on my newbuilds because they can be very convenient when troubleshooting, especially viruses, etc. Other than that, they really aren't useful for anything. The new flash drives will soon be the norm soon as the BIOSs are made to recognize them the same as an A drive. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.

Thanks Guys! It was just a novelty, akin to using both a cd-r and a cd-w on the same machine, just wanted to see if it would work. No wonder I never see 2.88 disks. Gee, even technology suffers from unpopularity! Thanks again!

The 2.88 floppies, LS120 drives and cd-rw all hit the market at about the same time... and the clear winner was the cd-rw. Lots of handy ideas that just never made it. Even though novelties like this are fun to play with on old systems, the media cost is usually more than the entire rig is worth. Skip

I beleive you can take a regular floppy and make it a 2.88. on the 740 kb floppy all you had to do punch another hole and format to make 1.44. Of coarse you'd need a floppy drive that supports 2.88, which aren't very common.

You have to have a 2.88 drive, have BIOS set to support it, and a 2.88 floppy diskette. Plus a version of OS that supports them. The last versions of DOS did, and Windows does. I have two old systems that use them. But a 2.88 floppy diskette will not work in a 1.44 drive, so they are not used much. As noted, CD-R and CD-RW won out. But then Windows does not support CD-Rom drives is Safe Mode?