Amstrad PPC640 part 2 (bootdisk)

From: Jim Strickland <jim_at_calico.litterbox.com>
Date: Fri Jan 10 01:08:01 2003

> How did you make a 720 boot disk? Did you find a 720k image or did
> you make 1.44s, boot a suffciently old PC and create a 720 using
> format /s?
>
>> Otherwise I'd be tempted to try FreeDOS.
>
> Seems to only be an ISO CD image!
>
>> I'm in the same position,
>> though, I don't have any way of making low density 3.5 inch boot
>> disks
>> for PCs anymore (unless I get busy and put my old PC back together).
>
> Surreal. I just tried to format a 720 in my new WinXP portable and
> the size wasn't even a option. And when I did it through the GUI
> under 2000 the anti-virus scanner had a fit. Finally had to format it
> using the CLI *and* I had to explicitly unmount it first to get the
> anti-virus software to let go.
>

Weird. You should be able to format a 720 in any 1.44 meg floppy
drive, if memory serves they were designed to be backward compatible
like that. My floppy drive on my PC dates back to my 286 days, so it's
old enough that I haven't had any problems. Don't know anything about
XP though, and don't care either. I'm a happy OS/X user. :)

As for what software to run on the thing... anything that does fast
screen updates is probably a bad idea, the supertwist screen is pretty
friggin slow. Also, anything that depends on color to look cool is
obviously a bad idea. I've run Norton Textra Writer on mine
successfully. Haven't mucked about much with more interesting things
like ip packet drivers and parallel port ethernet adapters, mostly
because I don't own any such adapters. I have this machine now mostly
because I lusted after them badly when they started to show up in the
computer catalogs of the day as they went on clearance for about $200.
Received on Fri Jan 10 2003 - 01:08:01 GMT