I have some old programs that need to be imaged onto one of those old 720 5 1/4 floppies. I'm using winimage and it says invalid format when I put in 1.44 floppies that I know are good. Apparently that doesn't work. Problem is I cant find 5 1/4 floppies anymore. Does anyone still manufacture them? If so, where would I get them. What I need to know is can I somehow format a 1.44 floppy to look like an old 720? I was messing around in DOS and typed format/? for help. If you put the /f switch in there that is for 720. So I tried it with a 1.44 and it said the disk was unusable(which it's not). I assume that you can only format an actual 5 1/4 floppy that way. To sum things up, I need to know 2 things. 1.) Can I format a 1.44 floppy to look like a 5 1/4 floppy. 2.) Where can I find 5 1/4 floppies.

5.25" floppies were 1.2mb or 360K. You can format 3.5" floppies to low density (720K) Here are the command line switches from MS-DOS: Microsoft(R) Windows 98 (C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1981-1999. C:\WINDOWS>format /? Formats a disk for use with MS-DOS. FORMAT drive: [/V[:label]] [/Q] [/F:size] [/B | /S] [/C] FORMAT drive: [/V[:label]] [/Q] [/T:tracks /N:sectors] [/B | /S] [/C] FORMAT drive: [/V[:label]] [/Q] [/1] [/4] [/B | /S] [/C] FORMAT drive: [/Q] [/1] [/4] [/8] [/B | /S] [/C] /V[:label] Specifies the volume label. /Q Performs a quick format. /F:size Specifies the size of the floppy disk to format (such as 160, 180, 320, 360, 720, 1.2, 1.44, 2.88). /B Allocates space on the formatted disk for system files. /S Copies system files to the formatted disk. /T:tracks Specifies the number of tracks per disk side. /N:sectors Specifies the number of sectors per track. /1 Formats a single side of a floppy disk. /4 Formats a 5.25-inch 360K floppy disk in a high-density drive. /8 Formats eight sectors per track. /C Tests clusters that are currently marked "bad." HTH Don

Don, Thanks for the response, but what is the exact command I need to do that? I really want to get this figured out. When I do this, will it fool Winimage into thinking it's a 5.25 disk? Once again, thanks for your help. -JR

http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi this may work

On a 1.44 disk there are 2 square holes on the bottom. One has a sliding tab while the other doesn't. The one that doesn't is for a sensor in the drive to detect if the disk is 1.44 or 720. If you tape over the hole on the disk, most floppy drives should automatically see the disk as a 720. You should then be able to use the regular dos format command: format a: If that doesn't work then: format a:/f:720 should do it.