how to reformat floppies that have data on them

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 15:10 -0800, Fred Erickson wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 19:29 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> > On Tuesday 10 April 2007 23:06, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> > > Rick Stevens wrote:
> > > > For an MS-DOS floppy,
> > > >
> > > >  #fdformat /dev/fd0H1440;mformat a:
> > >
> > > I don't think that udev creates anything but the /dev/fd0 for the
> > > first floppy with the default settings...
> > >
> > > Mikkel
> > 
> > Ok. Udev doesn't come into my equation, as I'm doing this on FC2.
> > 
> > I've now got a floppy formatted with a low level format using the following.
> > 
> > [root at localhost djmons]# fdformat -n /dev/fd0H1440
> > Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB.
> > Formatting ... done
> > 
> > So far so good, but I'm darned if I can get a filesystem on it using mformat, 
> > and have tried allsorts of incantations. It would be nice if some of these 
> > manpages had a simple example.
> > 
> > At the moment I feel a bit like grandpa munster (the count) having mislayed 
> > his book of spells, and trying to conjure something up by guesswork.
> > 
> > The floppy drive is almost new, and the floppy discs are Dyson MF2HD, 
> > formatted for IBM, double sided, high density, and have hardly been used if 
> > at all.
> > 
> > Mtools version on FC2 is 3.9.9
> > 
> > Anyone can help with the correct syntax for using mformat to add a filesystem 
> > to this low level formatted floppy.
> > 
> > Very frustrating.
> > 
> > Nigel.
> > 
> 
> Would one of the mkfs variants work for this? 

You could try

	mkfs -t msdos /dev/fd0
	mkdosfs /dev/fd0

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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
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