floppy disk formatting: how to?

Aldo Foot lunixer at gmail.com
Tue Sep 22 22:30:08 UTC 2009


On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Mikkel <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
> Hiisi wrote:
>> Dear list!
>> I wanted to use floppy disk for bios updating on my ancient desktop
>> running F11. Hence, I added this line to the end of /etc/fstab:
>> /dev/floppy           /media/floppy           auto    ro,user,noauto  0 0
>>
>> Now I can mount floppy using 'mount /media/floppy'.
>> I was trying to format the disk using 'floppy'. It detects the drive:
>> floppy -p
>> floppy 0.16 Copyright 2001-2006, Double Precision, Inc.
>>
>> floppy    /dev/fd0: 3.5" HD
>>
>> If I try 'floppy /dev/fd0' the output is:
>> floppy 0.16 Copyright 2001-2006, Double Precision, Inc.
>>
>> floppy: device /dev/fd0 not found in /etc/floppy
>>
>> I was unable to find that /etc/floppy file. There's no one with that
>> name. How can I format floppy?
>> Thanks in advance!
> man floppy
> or
> pinfo floppy
>
> You can create the /etc/floppy file by running, as root this
> command: floppy --createrc > /etc/floppy
>
> You should then be able to run something like:
> floppy --format A:
____

You can also choose to format with ext2 or fat filesystem.

floppy --ext2 --format A:          #ext2

/sbin/mkdosfs /dev/fd0           #fat

the latter allows you to use the floppy on both linux and windows.

~af




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