SDB:Formatting floppies under Linux

Floppies are formatted under Linux in 2 steps:

Low level format to create the track/sector structure.
High level format to create a file system (e.g. DOS FAT)

Low level format

The first step deals with the programme fdformat. It takes a parameter, the floppy disk drive's device name. The floppy's format is set to this name.

That is why it does not work if /dev/fd0 or /dev/fd1 are declared as parameter: with these device names kernel tries to find out, which disk format is available (but it cannot before formatting !). To format e.g. a floppy with 1.44 MByte in the (DOS) drive A , it must be entered the following:

fdformat /dev/fd0u1440

Afterwards one has a floppy with 2 Sides, 80 cylinders and 18 sectors formatted per track. Careful; at this point there are only sectors, not any file system yet.

High level format

The file system gets opened in the second step. Here it should be exemplarly presented the procedure for 2 file system kinds:

DOS-FAT:

A DOS-FAT is created with the programme mformat (packet mtools). To do it one enters the following:

 mformat a:
Nearly as simple as under DOS ;-)

Minix filesystem:

It is needed for this (as for e.g. ext2, etc.) the programme mkfs. So to get a minix floppy one enters:

mkfs -t minix /dev/fd0u1440
in order to stay at the above low level format disk. You can put this floppy into your Linux filesystem by
mount -t minix /dev/fd0 /mnt

Important hint:

As in other operating systems, all data gets lost in Linux when formatting on the data carrier! <keyword>Disks,Format,MSDOS,DOS,filesystem,Minix</keyword>