This floppy is like the TARDIS. It might look like a normal 1.2mb floppy, but apparently it has 4 gigs of bad sectors on it!

March 07, 2026 - 23:56 UTC

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Good news: You've got more than 3,000 times more storage!
Bad news: All of it will be corrupt.
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A TARDIS of badness.

A TURDIS, if you will.
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known bug:
jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/137/Q137816/
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in MS-DOS 2.0 format, you can see that they reset the calculated system size if the the system fails to transfer
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@nacl.sh
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Forget DBLSPACE, you must have used 4THOSPACE!
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I got nerd sniped.

4,294,626,816 = MAX_UINT32 - 386,560 + 1,213,952 - 1,167,872 + 1

bad = overflow - used + total - available + 1
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I'm sure I saw that back in the day.
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You have found the mythical Patient Zero of floppy discs - the one that spread damaged sectors to millions of other discs. You should immediately put all other floppies in your house into individual vacuum-sealed pouches.
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Been there, done that!
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I got yer floppy disk right here, pal!

Wait, that didn't come out right.
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It turns out you can “store” an arbitrary amount of data if you’re not interested in getting it back
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hahahaha XD
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How does one manage this?!
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Modern data compression technology be wild.
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You've found one of these: scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-335 #scp #floppydisks
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it's bigger on the inside!
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👀
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Are you sure it's just an indication that in 3537 other parallel universes your drive doesn't work? Or the floppy is bad? I mean for once we in this universe win. Coz I'm always losing socks to the other universes in my heated trans-dimensional spin portal known as a 1968 Whirlpool clothes dryer.
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Looks like an integer overflow.
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You've found the encryption algorithm from the Sandra bullock movie. The Net!
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Integer overflow?
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Interestingly the other math does not add up either. 386,560 bytes used, and 1,167,872 bytes free would mean the disk has a total of 1,554,432 bytes and not the 1,213,952 bytes reported.

So you have 4Gb of bad sectors, and around 1.5Mb of useable space on a 1.2Mb floppy.

It's pure magic!
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The math works fine; include a total space of -340,480 bytes worth of bad sectors into the total. 😊

(Incidentally, this probably means that the one bad sector that got run into is on track 2, head 1. I could probably math out which sector if I bothered looking at the FAT16 specs.)
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