In this lesson you will learn to:
When you buy a box of floppy disks from your supplier they are not ready to use straight away. Before you can use them they have to be “formatted”. This is a process that writes (electronically) a series of “tracks” and “sectors” onto the disk. It is by means of these tracks and sectors that DOS knows where to find the files on a disk. How it works is really quite simple. The disk works rather like a piece of magnetic recording tape. To find a particular piece of music you need to know the reading on the tape counter when the music starts. Once you wind the tape onto that “address” you will locate the music. A 5¼ inch floppy disk is divided into forty separate tracks on each side, numbered 0 to 39, and nine sectors numbered 0 to 8. This is shown in the diagram.
Any “address” is given in terms of the track and sector numbers. The outer tracks of each disk are reserved for directory entries and these consist of the name of the file, the address where its start can be found (in terms of track and sector), its length, and the date and time of its creation. You see most of this information when you obtain a directory listing.