Dos command to swap floppies

[Bmcdanold]

What is the dos command to swap two floppy drives? I have a game on a 5 1/4 disk but when i go to install it, it needs the disk in the a: drive which is my 3 1/2 floppy. How do i temporarily swap the drive letters? (A: 3.5" B:5.25 -> A: 5.25" B: 3.5") This in on a system running dos 6.2

[Jerkymom]

Can you just go into your BIOS setup and choose which type floppy goes on each drive letter, save and exit? Then when you're finished installing the game you can go into the BIOS and change them back.

Important: Please only do this if you're familiar with changing BIOS settings. If you change the wrong thing your computer could refuse to reboot.

Kim

[Paleo Pete]

Usually you'll also have to swap the drives' positions on the ribbon cable as well, since the floppy controller sees the drive at the end of the cable as A and the one on the middle connector as B. No way around this...Then reset the BIOS identification for the floppy drives.

Sorry, but it sounds like way too much trouble to play a game to me...

Try transferring the game to a 3 1/2" floppy and installing/running it from the A drive. That's the simplest solution. Then you're already running from the A drive to begin with...want the DOS command for that? http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif



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[Bmcdanold]

Well i would transfer to a 3.5" disk, but im not sure if there will be formatting problems or whatnot. If you think it will work go ahead and give me the commands.

[Paleo Pete]

It will work, I've done it many times. I use a 5 1/4" drive on this P-200 with win98 to copy files onto 360K floppies to use on my XT machines running DOS. As long as you do it right, it works like a charm. The format shouldn't cause problems unless you're going the other direction, like the 360K scenario above. In that case you have to format the 360K disk on the 360K drive, due to the 360K drive using track 0, which other floppies don't use, or format, and the fact that the 360K is a low density drive, and the 3 1/2" or 1.2MB 5 1/4" are high density drives. To go from 1.2MB floppies, or 360K for that matter, to a 3 1/2" floppy, no problem, it will work.

In DOS, at the C:\> prompt, assuming A: is a 3 1/2" drive, and B: is the 5 1/4" drive:

switch to B drive by typing b: (press [Enter])
copy *.* a: [Enter]

If you need to copy files and directories, use xcopy:

xcopy *.* a:

This can also be done in Windows, by going into Windows Explorer, and either drag and drop the files onto the target drive, or right click and use copy & paste, or the Send To option. I've done it plenty times this way too, works perfect. I have at least 25 games I downloaded onto my Pentium, then transferred to XT/AT machines using all of these methods. The only problem you'll have is with 360K floppies, which must be formatted on the 360K drive before trying to write to them with another drive.


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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

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