replacing old DD 3.5" floppy drive

[piano632]

Not sure if this is the right place to be asking this, but I have an old Smith Corona word processor/typewriter that has a 3.5" floppy drive in it. The problem is it's a DD drive and not a HD. And how far can you get with 720K discs these days? If I were to replace the DD drive with a HD do you think it would recognize it?

[reboot]

It should, even if it only recognized it as DD (720k). There's nothing terribly fancy about floppy drives, and many times I have replaced 720's with 1.44's in various ancient 386's with no trouble. (Anyone remember the Compaq "Lunchbox"?)
The odd time they have only been recognized as 720's, but that doesn't really matter in this case, does it?

[redwudz]

A HD floppy drive should be backward compatable with the older DD drives. The OS may not recogize the larger drive capacity, but should still work with the DD disks. Might luck out and be able to read/write the 1.4MB disks, also.

[Ripper2860]

Ahhh ...

The Compaq "Lunchbox". Those were the days -- Orange "Gas Plasma" screen with ISA/EISA expansion module (great for an Arcnet or Ethernet adapter). I remember many days toting my Compaq "Luchbox" unti configured as a Novell 2.12 and 3.11 server. Those were the days.

I still have a Compaq "Suitcase" oriiginal 8088 (4.77MHz) portable with CRT built-in and a Plus Hardcard 40MB HDD on a ISA adapter. A whopping 256K of RAM and DOS 3.1 !!! OOOwwwieeee. Those were the days in which "Batch Files" were the bomb !!

Anyhow --- a 1.44MB (HD)Floppy should be fine to replace a 720KB (DD) floppy. Although it will only read/write 720KB (DD).