About 1680kb Floppies OR DMF - Distribution Media Format

About 1680kb Floppies OR DMF - Distribution Media Format

I Suggest DFM 1024 (DMF-1) For Small Cluster Sizes

I will add more details, for now I'm just completing the suites/packs file lists and application descriptions, for all my releases.

Alkonost MaxFormat, free, can format floppies to DMF 1024 & DMF 2048

About DMF

DMF and 1.68 MB formats are the same physical format of 80 tracks and 21 sectors per track. The 1.68 MB format has 224 entries in the root directory, and a cluster size is 512 bytes. DMF format has only 16 entries in the root directory (you need create a subdirectory to copy more than 16 files), and the cluster size is 1024 (DMF 1024) or 2048 bytes (DMF 2048). You can check the cluster size in the Image Information...

Microsoft uses DMF 2048 for the floppy version of some of their newer software. Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 read and write directly in DMF format. You will need FDREAD for this format under MSDOS or Windows 3.1.

1.72 MB format uses 82 tracks and is not compatible with Windows NT/2000/XP/2003.

1.68 MB and DMF are the same physical format, and are compatible with Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. I highly suggest you don't use 1.72 MB.

The DMF 2048 format is often used for distribution floppies under Windows 95/98 and Windows NT.

The Below Article From Wikipedia Is Referring To DMF 1024 & DMF 2048

Distribution Media Format

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Distribution Media Format (DMF) is a format for floppy disks that Microsoft used to distribute software.[1][2] It allowed the disk to contain 1680 kB of data on a 3½-inch disk, instead of the standard 1440 kB. As a side effect, utilities had to specially support the format in order to read and write the disks, which made copying of products distributed on this medium more difficult. An Apple Macintosh computer running Disk Copy 6.3.3 on the Mac OS 7.6 or later operating system can copy and make DMF disks.[3] The first Microsoft software product that uses DMF for distribution were the "c" revisions of Office 4.x. It also was the first software product to use CAB files, then called "Diamond".

Comparison of DMF and standard 1440 kB 3½-inch diskettes:

 1440 kBDMF
Tracks8080
Sectors per track1821
Cluster size512 bytes1024 or 2048 bytes
Root directory entries22416

DMF in the form of a 1680 kB Virtual Floppy Disk (VFD) image and IBM Extended Density Format (XDF) images are supported by Windows Virtual PC.[4]

Comments

This website uses analytical cookies

Select which cookies to opt-in to via the checkboxes below; our website uses cookies to examine site traffic and user activity while on our site, for marketing, and to provide social media functionality. More details...

Cookie Policy