FDFormat is one of those programs like
PKZip, where once you use it you wonder how you ever got along without it. The simple explanation of what it does is that it formats standard 1.44mb
floppy disks to 1.68mb
DMF format (the kind
MS used to ship on), or to 1.72mb.
The complex explanation is that it
optimizes, not increases utilized space on the disk my modifying the number of
tracks, the number of
sectors per track and the number of sectors per
cluster. It can also modify the
interleave of the disk, and it can do something called
sector sliding. FDF can also change the number of
root directory entries, which define the maximum number of files and directories that can go in the root of the disk, and it can change the
interleave, which is the number of
revolutions the drive takes to read one track.
For more information, download the package at:
ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/linux/tsx-11-mirror/680x0/bin/system/floppy/fdformat.tar.gz
(for Linux) or
ftp://ftp1.sunet.se/puba/pc/mirror/simtelnet/msdos/diskutil/fdform18.zip
(for Windows/DOS)