THE SYSTEM DRIVES

2 THE SYSTEM DRIVES

This chapter contains useful information about the drives that are currently fitted in your computer, either behind the front drop-down panel or, in the case of the Hard drive, inside the system.

Using the floppy disk drive

The floppy disk drive is usually configured in the system BIOS as drive A:, with a capacity of 1.44 Mbytes.

Virtually all software still supplied on floppy disk is now sent out in HD (or 1.44 MB) format from the manufacturer. This is the type of drive fitted to your Apricot computer. This drive will however read the common older type of DS-DD(or 720KB). the immediately obvious physical differences are shown below.

The true high density floppy has the ‘HD’ logo near the window and an extra hole beside the label, to enable the drive to identify it. The other hole, that exists on both disks, is for a write protect tab (on the underside) which, if closed, will prevent the system from writing any data onto the disk.

Do not try to force the format of a DS-DD disk to the higher format of 1.44 Mbytes as this will lead to many formatting errors, with a very high risk of losing all data placed on that disk. This is due to the ‘HD’ disk having a very different magnetic surface.

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