Format 720K floppy disk in Windows XP

Helping my dad today with some old disks, we realised that in XP Microsoft removed the 720K option from the GUI format tool, and the /F:720 flag is gone from FORMAT on the command line! Fortunately if you specify the tracks and sectors manually it recognises the 720K disk and formats it.

FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9

I don't have any machines with floppy drives running Vista or 7, but I assume this still works in later versions.

Tagged: thoughts floppy-disks guide howto retrocomputing windows windows-xp

Who wrote this?

Me!

Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person.

This blog is powered by the excellent FreeBSD and OpenZFS. Also check out BSD Now.

You can buy me a coffee or send a comment if you found this post useful or entertaining. Cheers.