Last revision of this page: March 6, 2025

If you have managed to set up an 8" drive under DOS, you still have the problem that these old drives only support 77 tracks. FORMAT A: works fine up to track 77, but after that it gets noisy because the controller wants to make the drive step to track 78 - 80. But that is not possible because these tracks do not exist. Just use FDFORMAT and everything is fine!

With this very simple solution you can use 8" drives or floppy disks under MS-DOS. Nothing more is required. Due to the fact that 8" drives are simply large 1.2MB drives, this solution fits seamlessly into the DOS operating system. Period!

By the way, the easiest way to access CP/M files under PC/MS-DOS is with 22DISK from SYDEX (by Chuck Guzis). Chuck is a really old hand.

According to Jozef Bogin, the decisive factor for his own software development was my website on the 8" drives. And I must say, he has created a wonderful application with 8FORMAT; it works well. He also makes his source code available on Github, see below. It doesn't get any better than that.

All you need is Turbo C 2.0 on your computer. Compile, link and you're ready to go. 8FORMAT can of course do a little more. Take a closer look at the following parameters.

• Jozef Bogin: Website
• Jozef Bogin: Github

1. (↑) Jozef Bogin: http://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/8format/