🚀 go-pugleaf

The DRIVPARM= parameter for CONFIG.SYS is one of the things that
has been [quasi?] officially acknowledged as not always working
correctly.

I have had varying degrees of luck with it on the machines here.
It seems to matter what BIOS is in the machines.  Machines with
dumb BIOS seem to get along better with DRIVPARM= than newer
machines.

You may want to use the DRIVER.SYS installable device driver
instead of DRIVPARM=.  DRIVER.SYS takes the same option switches as
specifying DRIVPARM=.  The advantage is that DRIVER.SYS is
self-contained, and would appear from personal experience to have
fewer problems with BIOS conflict.  The disadvantage with using
DRIVER.SYS is that it has to assign a logical drive letter one
letter greater than your last physical drive.  Thus, on a hard disk
system a 1.44 meg 3.5 inch drive is stuck being accessed as drive D
when you use the 1.44 meg mode, while it is B: in 720K mode.  (The
only way I've been able to get 1.44 meg drives work is by using
DRIVER.SYS.)  One might try supplying the appropriate leading
zeros, etc.  For instance, you might want to enter the heads switch
as /H02.

Note that IBM PS/2s have integral support for 1.44 meg, and don't
require DRIVER.SYS.  I have a PS/2 model 80, and it insists on
formatting even 720K disks as 1.44 meg.  Maybe it needs a DRIVER.SYS
running to go to the low density mode for formatting.  The PS/2
seems to correctly sense the density of disks that have already
been formatted some place else.  By the way, for the record, I
don't recommend formatting 720K disks for 1.44 meg.

Grrrrr.

--Bill