Subject: Re: Formatting Floppy Disks
From: nathan r. hruby (nhruby@arches.uga.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 20 2001 - 06:31:25 MST
On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Dan Calhoun wrote:
> I have found a util KFloppy, does this work? It can't locate my drive
> as it is named /fd0 and it is looking for /fd0h1440. Do I give it this
> name in fstab. Is there a GUI for zip drive formatting???
>
Sorry if this has already been answered.
/dev/fd0h1440 and /dev/fd0 are sort of the same thing. The kernel can
autodetect some types of floppies (720k, 1.44M, etc..) when you stick it
in and try to mount it. The way the kernel does this is by having a
special device, /dev/fdN, where N is the number of your floppy drive
starting at 0. When you try to mount /dev/fd0 the kernel will (sort of)
transparently make a choice as to what kind of floppy you have in your
drive, and then mount it.
If the kernel can't determine what kind of floppy you have (say, becasue
it needs a format :) you need to go to the old standby method of naming
floppies /dev/fd0h1440 (floppy0 - Hi Density - 1440 K) My my experince,
the kernel sometimes has difficulty auto-detecting floppies.
However, you don't need to mount the floppy in order to format it.
Use "fdformat /dev/fd0" (should work as a normal user) which will format a
floppy. After that you can put a filesystem on it with one of the
mk<fstype> commands and then mount it.
A zip is not a floppy, so it shouldn't need formatting, just a filesystem
made on it.
HTH,
-n
-- ...... nathan hruby - nhruby@arches.uga.edu computer support specialist department of drama and theatre http://www.drama.uga.edu/ ......
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