Formatting a floppy (360 KB) in an ancient PC

Watch out! You are about to read how to format an ancient floppy disk. Make a U-turn now or go on reading. You have been warned ;D !

I need an operating system for my old PCs. There are many of them up in my fathers attic waiting for a restart!

First thing to do was to get those floppies. How lucky I was when a gentle person donated me a box with 10 unused BASF floppies inside! Yippee!

Next those floppies needed some formatting. Again, Mr. Fortuna appeared making my task easy. An old 286 PC, which I own, already had MS-DOS 6 inside! All I needed to do was to start formatting. Off I went and typed in the following command: format a: /F:360. That's it!

Now I have the floppies ready for the next round. There is a free version of DOS available. And the name is... FreeDOS! What's best, ready made floppy images can be downloaded here: http://jorisvr.nl/freedos.html . I guess an application called rawrite can do the trick and write those images on floppies. Not 100 % sure though.

You do remember those days of DOS, don't you! Hmm, some 30 years ago. I couldn't afford a PC back then, though. However there was Commodore 64 with an external floppy drive which was familiar for me. So stay tuned for more (vintage) information and keep on reading my blog.

PS One of my friends hinted me my 5,25" drive in 286 PC is 1.2 MB compatible. So when formatting floppies in 360 KB size the resulted floppies might be incompatible or at not that good. We'll see...