Media Descriptor Byte

[Xemus]

Does anyone out there know of a utility that will rewrite the media descriptor byte on a floppy disk without formatted the disk? We have a problem here on campus involving students bringing in disks that they formatted on they home computers running Windows 9x, and Windows XP not recognizing the disk as being formatted because 9x doesn't include a media descriptor byte when it formats. NT, 2K, and XP require the byte, so I'm looking for a utility that will write it onto the disk without having to reformat first.
I have seen Norton Diskedit, but I'm wondering if someone has written a quick editor. Any help is greatly appreciated. MCSE, A+

 

[gargouille]

Arcane info from a newsgroup posting...you might ferret out the info you need...

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...te+without+format&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

 

[Stealer]

I just formated a floppy using win98 and tried it out on my xp machine and had no problems reading the disk.
How can this be?

Stealer

 

[Xemus]

It's not a gurantee that it wont be recognized, but it happens enough that I need a solution. We may be buying disk editor now, but I am still curious if anyone has written a program to do this. Seems fairly simple, but let me know if anyone sees anything.
Thanks. MCSE, A+

 

[jimbackus]

AFAIK the media descriptor byte is part of the boot sector on a floppy. Using a disk editor implies, at least to me, that you are going to manually edit any problematic disk. An alternative would be to write a short programme that reads the boot sector using low level BIOS commands, modifies the relevant byte and writes it back. The only snag is that it will probably trigger virus detection programmes. As floppies are almost universally 3.5 inch, 1.44 MB there should be no need to cater for older formats.

 

[Xemus]

Thanks for the info. Further hindering my efforts, appartently Norton took disk edit out of the latest version of Norton Utilities. MCSE, A+