Abstract: A disk drive detects whether a disk inserted therein has a frame-based enhanced formatting. Disks having the frame-based enhanced formatting are readable by enhanced drives, e.g., those with the tape drive emulators. The frame-based enhanced formatting imposes on the data (1) an data organization, imperceptible to disk drive 22, for rendering the data expressible and locatable in a tape drive format, and (2) an additional degree of error correction that provides enhanced data integrity necessary for data backup/restore operations. The detection stems from a secondary formatting operation of the invention in which a format type identification is recorded on the disk. Preferably, the format type identification is recorded as one disk sector at a beginning logical block address of the disk, and forms part of a volume header frame. The volume header frame is followed by a directory comprising one or more directory frames.