Single-Sided Floppies

I just got some new old music hardware from a friend–a Roland S-330 sampler module. It only takes floppies for loading samples so I went digging through my old boxes for some floppies I can use. I found a couple, but then came to learn that not only does the system take floppies only, but it also requires them to be single-sided 720K floppies.

After doing a little research on the web I found that the trick is to take a Double-Sided Double-Density floppy, cover the hole in the disk opposite the write-protect hole with tape and then format it as a 720K disk. Sounds easy enough and fortunately it is. The only problem now is that in Windows XP the format command:

c:\> format a: /F:720

Does not work. The only option in XP is to use /F:1.44. I then dug a little deeper and came across this gem, which does the correct formatting:

C:\> format a: /T:80 /N:9

When I get a little more time, I’ll look up exactly what each of these does, but for now suffice it to say, it does the job and I have now turned several perfectly good 1.44MB floppy discs into 720K floppy discs. Who would have ever thought that might be desireable? :-D

2 thoughts on “Single-Sided Floppies”

  1. Thanks!
    I thought I’d be unable to format my 720k (DS DD) floppies till I found this post. Your method works equally well on these old disks which the Microsoft Format option (accessed via a right-click on the 3½ inch floppy listed under My Computer) singularly fails to do.

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