Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions

I was formating a couple of floppy disks, to make room for a ftp install of suse. However, the files you are suposed to put on the floppys are 1.4 mb. I thought "Fine, I have a 1.44 mb disk here". But appearantly windows uses 600kb on....tmp files or something.
If anyone knows how I might fix this problem, I would be very grateful!

Thx
G-wizz

(At last! A use for my floppy drive!)

I formatted a floppy and while I get 1.38 MB free, that is 1,457,664 bytes. Are you sure that there is a problem?


I was able to nudge the free space a little higher with:

format A: /Q /A:2048

That gives me: 1,462,272 bytes or 1.39 MB.

do you have a cd burner? can you system boot from cd? if so then you can just burn the boot image and do the ftp install that way.

Okay: First off; I don´t have a cd burner, so that´s no good. (Besides I was installing suSE, wich can only be installed ftp-wise)
However, the method you descibed, making 1.39mb free, does not fix the problem, seing as how I need 1.4: The full disk.
But I´ve asked on differant boards and no one seems to know.
If formatting the disk on a unix machine fix it? Formatting in a diff filestystem?

But thanks for the fast reply!

G-wizz

i only know about this from a windblows point of view, and that is that i reckon they use a fat16/32 file system on the disk. the file system part of the format is probably what is taking the space up. It could also be that the floppy disk has got 1.44 meg free, but some of that is taken up by the boot sector. in any case, ever 3.5 inch disk that i've ever formatted, that i can remember, comes up at about 1.38 meg.