D360KB drive-With this drive, use 5 l/4-inch, double-sided, double-density, 48 TPI (tracks per inch), 360KB diskettes. (You can also use single-sided, 160KB or 180KB diskettes.) These diskettes contain 40 tracks per side, 8 or 9 sectors per track, and hold up to 360KB of information, which is approximately 150 pages of text. (With 8 sectors per track, a diskette holds up to 320KB.)
Note
Before you can use them with MS-DOS, you must format new diskettes using the MS-DOS FORMAT command. 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 contain data you want to erase. See Chapter 4 for instructions on formatting diskettes.
Drive and diskette incompatibilities
If your computer has more than one type of diskette drive, or if you use diskettes from other computers with other types of diskette drives, you need to be aware of certain incompatibilities between the diskette drives and the diskettes they use.
Because of the size difference, you cannot use 5 l/4-inch diskettes in a 3 l/z-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.
3 ‘/I-inchdrive/diskette compatibility
Drive type Diskette types it can read from and write to
720KB 720KB
1.44MB 720KB, 1.44MB
Using the Equity 386SX 3-13