Problem involving Floppies' 1.38 v. 1.44 Mb capacity

Alright, I have a PC (With XP on it, everything works fine) but I just got another PC, an old Pentium I 450 MHzthat works just fine, but it has a blank Hard Disk and a Floppy Drive (both working). I want to put DOS or a DOS-imitating OS on there, and I found an imitation DOS program (www.freedos.org), but I need to put the 1.44 Mb file onto a floppy to install it.

My problem is, Floppies only hold 1.38 when formatted. So, I'm in a bit of a bind, because the only way I have to input information to the 450 MHz machine is via the floppy. My question is, is there a way to write to an unformatted floppy, or to format a floppy so that it still retains 1.44 Mb?

Or is there a better way to get DOS onto my system and I'm going about it all wrong?

Floppies only hold 1.38MB when formatted as a "System floppy" (ie. with the system boot files), or at least that was the way it was the last time I checked.

Either way, usually when something requires a "1.44MB" floppy disk, they're still taking into account that the space may actually be less. When I last used FreeDOS, all it wanted was just the 3.5", 1.44MB Floppy - there is actually a smaller capacity 3.5", that's why they specified the 1.44MB Double Density, Double Sided (DD/DS) floppy.

Unless you've actually tried it and are having problems, I would just get it, and see if it works. Why worry about something until you run into the actual problem?

Yeah, I did try it. I downloaded it, and the file is 1.44 Mb, and every one of my floppies has only 1.38 Mb. I've tried to simply copy it, and it says there's not enough space on the floppy...

Umm...bump...

If I can't get DOS working I'll try to see if I can find one of my old Win95 or WinME floppies and run it off of that...

If what you downloaded is a single file and it's supossed to let you boot a PC and even more being it a 1.44Mb file, what you probably have is a Floppy Disk Image that is meant to be written to the disk in raw mode. Perhaps WinImage might be the program you need (or something similar). That would write the file to disk regardless its format, byte to byte. Or else I doubt it'll let you boot at all. Let me know if that helps!

From Patagonia...

Marito

Great, thanks! I'll try it out when I get a chance...