Distribution Media Format (DMF) is a
format
Format may refer to:
Printing and visual media
* Text formatting, the typesetting of text elements
* Paper formats, or paper size standards
* Newspaper format, the size of the paper page
Computing
* File format, particular way that informatio ...
for
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
s that
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
used to distribute
software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
.
It allowed the disk to contain 1680 KB of data on a 3-inch disk, instead of the standard 1440 KB. As a side effect, utilities had to specially support the format in order to read and write the disks, which made
copying
Copying is the duplication of information or an artifact based on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it. With analog forms of information, copying is only possible to a limited degree o ...
of products distributed on this
medium
Medium may refer to:
Science and technology
Aviation
*Medium bomber, a class of war plane
* Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design
Communication
* Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data
* Medium of ...
more difficult. An Apple Macintosh computer running
Disk Copy 6.3.3 on the Mac OS 7.6 or later operating system can copy and make DMF disks.
The first Microsoft software product that uses DMF for distribution were the "c" revisions of Office 4.x. It also was the first software product to use
CAB files, then called "Diamond".
Comparison of DMF and standard 1440 KB 3-inch diskettes:
DMF in the form of a 1680 KB
Virtual Floppy Disk (VFD) image and
IBM Extended Density Format
The IBM eXtended Density Format (XDF) is a way of superformatting standard high-density 3½-inch and 5¼-inch floppy disks to larger-than-standard capacities. It is supported natively by IBM's PC DOS versions 7 and 2000 and by OS/2 Warp 3 ...
(XDF) images are supported by
Windows Virtual PC.
See also
*
2M, a program that allows the formatting of high-capacity floppy disks
*
fdformat
Fdformat is the name of two unrelated programs:
* A command-line tool for Linux that " low-level formats" a floppy disk.
* A DOS tool written in Pascal by Christoph H. Hochstätter that allows users to format floppy disks to a higher than usu ...
, a DOS program that allows the formatting of high-capacity floppy disks
*
HDCopy
HDCopy is a disk image application for floppy disks that runs in MS-DOS. It can copy a floppy on the fly, or by using archives with IMG file extension that store the content of the disk with a proprietary file format (whose first three bytes noted ...
, a DOS program that can read and write floppy disk and disk images in multiple formats, including DMF
*
IBM Extended Density Format
The IBM eXtended Density Format (XDF) is a way of superformatting standard high-density 3½-inch and 5¼-inch floppy disks to larger-than-standard capacities. It is supported natively by IBM's PC DOS versions 7 and 2000 and by OS/2 Warp 3 ...
(XDF), a high-density diskette format used by IBM
References
{{Reflist, refs=
[{{cite web , url=http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120348 , title=Definition of Distribution Media Format (DMF) , publisher= Microsoft Knowledge Base , date=2007-01-19 , access-date=2011-10-16 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110914232540/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120348 , archive-date=2011-09-14 , url-status=dead]
[{{cite book , url=https://archive.org/details/winnlroschhardwa00rosc_0 , title=Floppy Disks , work=Hardware Bible 1997
, author-first=Winn L. , author-last=Rosch , isbn=0-672-30954-8 , publisher=]SAMS Publishing
Sams Publishing is dedicated to the publishing of technical training manuals and is an imprint of Pearson plc, the global publishing and education company.
Sams Publishing was founded in 1946 by Howard W. Sams, originally producing radio schem ...
, date=1997-04-18 , quote=... reducing the inter-record gap (the space between sectors) down to nine bytes ... Each track uses a 2:1 interleave factor ... The DMF format also skews the sectors on adjacent tracks by three sectors ... , access-date=2011-10-16 , url-access=registration
[{{cite web , url=http://www.macgui.com/downloads/?file_id=23402 , title=Disk Copy 6.3.3 , publisher=]Apple Computer, Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
, date=1999 , access-date=2016-04-27
[{{cite web , author-last=Armstrong , author-first=Ben , title=Floppy disk image formats supported by Virtual PC and Virtual Server , url=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/01/04/floppy-disk-image-formats-supported-by-virtual-pc-and-virtual-server.aspx , work=Virtual PC Guy's Blog , publisher=]Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
, access-date=2011-10-16 , date=2007-01-05 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170826193600/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/virtual_pc_guy/2007/01/04/floppy-disk-image-formats-supported-by-virtual-pc-and-virtual-server/
, archive-date=2017-08-26 , url-status=dead
External links
About DMF
Floppy disk computer storage
Microsoft