720KB drive-With this drive, use 3½-inch, double-sided, double-density, 135 TPI, 720KB diskettes. These diskettes contain 80 tracks per side, 9 sectors per track, and hold up to 720KB of information-approximately 300 pages of text.

1.44MB drive-With this drive, use 3½-inch, double- sided, high-density, 135 TPI, 1.44MB diskettes. These diskettes contain 80 tracks per side, 18 sectors per track, and hold up to 1.44MB of information-approximately 600 pages of text.

If your computer has more than one type of these drives or if you use diskettes from other computers, you need to be aware of certain incompatibilities between the drives and the diskettes they use.

Note

You must format new diskettes before you can use them with

an operating system. Formatting erases all the data on a diskette and prepares it to receive new data, so be sure to format only new blank diskettes or diskettes that contains data you want to erase. See Chapter 4 for instructions on formatting diskettes.

Drive and diskette incompatibilities

Because of the size difference, you cannot use 3½-inch diskettes in a 5¼-inch drive or vice versa. There are also certain limitations on using diskettes that are the same size as the drive but have different capacities. The following tables summarize the possibilities and limitations.

5¼-inch drive/diskette compatibility

Drive type

Diskette types it can read from and write to

360KB 160KB, 180KB, 320KB, or 360KB

1.2MB 160KB, 180KB, 320KB, 360KB, or 1.2MB

Using Your Computer

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