How to Add a 2.88 floppy to Your PC
                         by John C. Ebsen

Backup of your hard drive is done twice as compactly with 2.88 3"
inch diskettes (as compared with 1.44s) and can avoid the cost of
a tape backup.  Using the Doublespace utility which comes with MS
Dos 6.2, it is possible to format a 2.88 to hold 4.64 megs of
data.  

Backup on disk is more reliable than on tape.  Tape backup
suffers data loss from time to time whereas loss of data backed
up on disk is quite rare.  Most stand-alone PC users don't
generate vast amounts of new data on their hard drives on a daily
basis.  A short incremental backup of only files added/modified
since the last backup is easily accomplished.

The cost of 2.88s, an early drawback, has dropped.  New Toshiba
Extra Density (XD) disks needed for 2.88 are available at retail
for $2.30 but the writer has been able to buy XD relabels by
mail-order in quantities of twenty at 99 cents each.  Relabels
are disks that were factory loaded with data which has been
erased and the disk relabeled.

Adding a 2.88 is somewhat more tricky than adding any other
floppy because it requires specific BIOS which it must get from
either the motherboard or the controller card.  Recently
manufactured BIOS have 2.88 3" inch floppy as one of the drive
options when running BOIS setup.   The fact that you have this
option on your motherboard BIOS does NOT mean that you can use a
regular controller.  

Even if you have a 2.88 option in your motherboard BIOS, you
still need a 2.88 controller.  2.88 cannot run off a regular
controller at this time, regardless of its data transfer rate. 
Regardless of what the vendors say, there is no reliable software
at this time that will allow a 2.88 to run using a regular
controller.  In a recent price check, the writer found that an
IDE hard drive/floppy controller without BIOS increased about $20
in price with 2.88 capability present. 

IDE 2.88 controllers are available (without BIOS on the
controller card) to control both hard drives and 2.88 floppies on
the same controller card.  This may be important because if you
add a floppy-only controller card to add 2.88 capability, you
will probably have it be the slave controller card (with respect
to the hard drive controller card) and that means you can't have
the 2.88 be the A: drive. 

If you have a 2.88 option in your motherboard BIOS, the
controller does not need its own BIOS.  Why have BIOS on the
controller at all then?  Buy it to improve performance and for no
other reason.
Take care with selecting the 2.88 drive as well.  For most 2.88
floppy drives, the effort in setting the jumpers in the back
while installing is minimal or not required (because the floppy
has an auto recognition feature).  For the Teac 2.88 floppy this
is not true.  To provide maximum flexibility, the Teac floppy has
a 4x7 matrix of jumper pins which must be manually jumped with
four to eight jumpers in a custom fashion for each brand of
controller.

To understand the nature of the need for custom jumpers, a little
background is necessary.  Unsurprisingly, the pin protocol on the
cable between a typical floppy drive and its controller card
follows an industry standard.  2.88 however, uses more pins and
there is no industry standard protocol for the way a floppy
controller talks to a 2.88 drive over those extra pins.  As a
result, some (but not all) 2.88 controller manufacturers have
begun including the jumper settings needed for the Teac 2.88
along with the controller card instructions. 

On the other hand, because the PC industry is accustomed to so
much standardization, some controllers come without instructions. 
Then the fun begins.  Teac technical support does not pretend to
know the settings on its 2.88 drives applicable to all
controllers, and controller technical support is all over the
map, ranging from excellent at Wonder Systems to minimal at
Acculogic.

Also, please note that DR DOS 6.0 does not support 2.88
correctly, even though the DR DOS 6.0 manual refers to 2.88 at
various points in the text.  The writer was not able to determine
if DR DOS 7.0 has corrected the 2.88 bug.  To be safe, use the
latest version of either MS DOS or IBM DOS (see endnote).

Before we go further, we should knock the halo off MS DOS 6.2. 
MS DOS 6.2 itself works with 2.88 floppies just fine.  However,
MSBackup, the new disk backup utility that come with 6.2, does
not fully support 2.88.  MSBackup treats 2.88 like an alien drive
and will put at most 4.2 megs of data onto the disk.  This is OK
but falls somewhat short of the 4.64 meg capacity created by
Doublespace.  
 
To fully utilize the capacity created by Doublespace, I have
utilized a little shareware utility called FCOPY, available from
Public Software Library, Houston.  FCOPY works much like DOS's
XCOPY except that it will split a file between two disks if the
disk becomes full in the middle of a file when doing a backup. 
This allows a drive to be backed up over a number of 2.88 disks
in one continuous operation.  The archive bit can be controlled
to allow for subsequent incremental backups, i.e., back up only
the files that are new or changed. 

2.88 speeds up backup as compared to 1.44 and takes up less space
in my diskette files.  It avoids the cost of a tape drive for
back up and leave me with one more bay free.  I think 2.88 is
just right for the stand-alone PC user.


ENDNOTE:  If you try to swap 2.88s diskettes with other PCs,
there is a quirk to be cautious about.  The writer uses a generic
486 PC.  When MS DOS 6.2's Scandisk utility is run on a 2.88
diskette originally formatted on an IBM Brand PC, Scandisk always
replaces the FAT media byte and conforms the backup copy of the
FAT to the primary copy.