FORMATTING FLOPPY or ZIP-DISK


Floppy:

Formatting a floppy in Linux has a lot more options then you might suspect . . The normal way to do it is:

But, and here is the fine print, you can also get more bytes on your floppy:

( for 1722kB, but even up to 1920 kB is possible )

Here are all the formats:

fd0u1440 fd0u1722 fd0u1840 fd0u720 fd0u830
fd0u1040 fd0u1600 fd0u1743 fd0u1920 fd0u800
fd0u1120 fd0u1680 fd0u1760 fd0u360 fd0u820

NOTE: For a Mandrake 9.2 boot floppy you will need a 1722kB floppy
See also: Making a Boot Floppy




Zip

Now for the zip disk, usually on /dev/sda, for making a Linux native filesystem:

Or make a DOS FAT filesystem:

Most distro´s have these commands too ( they all have to be run as root ):
mkfs.ext2
mkfs.ext3
mkfs
mkfs.bfs,
mkfs.cramfs
mkfs.minix
mkfs.msdos
mkfs.vfat
See 'mkfs.vfat –help' for the full info on those commands.

So, that was pretty simple wasn´t it ?


Bruno


-- Oct 23 2003 ( Revised Dec 9 2005 ) --