Floppy formats are standardized so that there are specifications what is the distance between tracks (e.g. The track identification part is quite simple. Picture 4a: Floppy Disk Format 4b: Apple Floppy Disk Format Picture 1: Floppy disk Sectors, Tracks and Clusters Or more broadly how does a floppy drive (driver) identify the unique sectors?Īlso if I understand it correctly the formatting type (Picture 4) determines the sector structure so in order to analyse and visualize the bad sectors, firstly the formatting type needs to be determined and understood in order to visualize? This raised the following question: How do both applications know the start of the first sector and the end of a the last sector of a floppy disk, in order to accurately visualize it on an image (FDM) or progress-like bar (NDD)? When is the disk in the proper direction visualized, assuming sector 1 starts at position twelve-o'clock on the left visualization and on 0% in the second visualization. I've recently found a more modern application 'Floppy Disk Master-7' (Picture 2) (FDM) that visualized the bad sectors, tracks and clusters (Picture 1) on a floppy disk in a similar (but fancier) way to the older 'Norton Disk Doctor' (Picture 3) (NDD).

Floppy disk formats