floppy disk formatting: how to?

[Sam Varshavchik]

Aldo Foot writes:

> On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Sam Varshavchik <mrsam at courier-mta.com> wrote:
> <...snip...>
>>>
>>> Whenever I'm trying the command above I have:
>>> floppy --ext2 --format A:
>>> floppy 0.16 Copyright 2001-2006, Double Precision, Inc.
>>>
>>> /dev/fd0H1440: Tiedostoa tai hakemistoa ei ole
>>> No formattable capacities for /dev/fd0
>>
>> You're missing some device node.
>>
>> Run 'MAKEDEV fd0'
> _____
> 
> How was he able to get the "Formattable capacities for /dev/fd0:" he showed
> in a previous email?

floppy first opens /dev/fd0 and ioctls the device driver to read the 
available format capacity. An open of /dev/fd0 succeeds even if the inserted 
floppy is unformatted.

But you cannot issue a format on /dev/fd0 in this instance, because the 
floppy is unformatted. A format issued on /dev/fd0 only works for floppies 
that are already formatted, and uses the same density as the existing 
format. Therefore, floppy takes the selected format capacity from /dev/fd0 
(the highest supported, by default), then maps it back to its corresponding 
/dev/fd0xxxxxx device name, opens that, and then issues the format ioctls.

This is really ancient stuff that I haven't touched in a while. I was even 
sufficiently motivated -- seeing that this hasn't been forgotten -- to go in 
and add the --ext3 option. When I did that -- and only after rummaging 
around the house to find an actual floppy -- I discovered that 1.44mb is too 
small for ext3, hahahaha.

I know that he's missing /dev nodes because that's exactly what happened to 
me, when I tried to test it. Somehow, at some point in the last six years, 
a bunch of /dev/fdnxxxxxx device nodes vanished in Fedora, and it was 
necessary to run MAKEDEV manually to bring them back. WTF???

And I don't remember why floppy wound up in the util-linux-ng rpm. It was 
never part of util-linux. It's a separate package, which is included in the 
Fedora util-linux-ng RPM. The floppy tarball also includes a GTK tool, which 
gets stripped out and not even included in util-linux, since it requires 
gtk.

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