Concerning 3.5 inch floppy writing.

[efs]

Salutations.

Recently I have gotten my hands on a 3-mode (advertised as supporting 720KB/1.25MB/1.44MB) USB floppy disk reader/writer and a couple of 3 inch floppies to attempt writing some X68k software onto, to find out if everything is working as it should.

Using the wiki guide for writing to 3.5 inch floppy disks, I ran through the necessary steps to format the disk accordingly. The drive works fine, as do the floppies. However, formatting the disk itself is where I encounter difficulty. Using either of the FORMAT commands provided on the wiki page results in a "Parameters not compatible" error, and nothing happens. I've tried formatting using the Windows utility itself, though it only allows for formatting to 1.44 MB. I'm at a loss.

Does anyone have an idea of what the problem may be? I don't think it's the drive's fault, as it was stated that it had 3-mode support. It could be the floppies, but I have no idea. Here's an infodump, in case it will help:

I am using Windows 7, 64-bit. The drive I am using is an IBM MPF82E USB Portable Diskette Drive, and the floppies themselves are Verbatim DataLife MF 2HD (IBM Formatted) disks. Currently I have no other disks to use, but that can be easily rectified.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

[BlueBMW]

The format command doesnt work right in windows 7... youll have to use an xp or older machine to format them.

[efs]

I suspected something like that'd be the case. Thanks for the info, I'll seek out a PC with XP.