I was digging around in my hard drive and came across this program I wrote many years ago. NFORMAT is a floppy disk formatter that lets you control many of the low level details of the formatting process and file system. You can use it to format floppy disks to greater capacity than normal. For example a 1.4 meg floppy disk can be formatted to hold 1.7 megs and 360k disk, when used in 1.2meg drive, can hold 830k.

This program does not run properly in a Windows 95/98/ME DOS box. Surprisingly it seems to work in a Windows NT 4/2000/XP dos box, but I have not extensively tested that.

Some of the "maximized" disk parameters very likely will not work correctly on many drives. I think the default 1.7meg format may have too many extra tracks, unfortunately when that happens it appears to format successfully even though it has just clobbered the next to last track. You will likely need to reduce the number of tracks from 83 to 82. Disable "immediate verify" to catch problems with this.

None of the default parameters are identical to the Microsoft "DMF" format. The DMF format has only 16 directory entries, limits itself to 80 tracks, 21 sectors per track, and if I recall correctly, uses 4 sectors per cluster. You can insert new parameters and edit them for this format if needed.

For more information you can read the NFORMAT! documentation.

The only thing I have changed in this file is my contact information.

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