[lug] floppy drive

D. Stimits stimits at idcomm.com
Tue Dec 18 12:13:36 MST 2001


LittleViggy at alum.manhattan.edu wrote:
> 
> I just wanted to add that this will "format" the floppy disk in the ext2
> format, i.e. unreadable in Windows.
> 
> If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I played with floppy disks
> under *nix), during the install of Slakware, you have the option of installing
> "MSDOS Floppy tools".  This installs a set of tools to format the floppy in DOS
> format, and a couple of other things (I think there are commands to make
> directories, etc. too).
> 
> Also, if you want to mount a DOS/WIndows floppy, you need to have the VFAT
> driver compiled into the kernal (or as a module) and might have to:
> 
> mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /floppy

Don't forget the ever popular correct means to remove the floppy...after
it has been mounted, do not remove it without:
umount /dev/fd0
(or umount /floppy, assuming that is an existing directory that it was
mounted on...alter /floppy to be any empty directory, maybe even
/mnt/floppy...a mount point is just an empty directory, mounting makes
the contents of the mounted device appear as directory contents...you
must unmount with umount prior to removing the floppy, else it thinks an
error occurred and the device died)

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> Viggy
> 
> >
> > Under Linux the act of formating a disk is called "creating a filesystem".
> > The command to do this is "mkfs" so I'd suggest looking at the man page
> > for this.  Type "man mkfs".  This is complicated by the fact that one has
> > a choice of which file system to use.  However, to keep this relatively
> > short I'm not going to cover that.  For comparison purposes, keep in mind
> > that MSWindows really only has the one file system so the choice has
> > already been made for you.
> >
> > So to summarize you'd first become the root user in order to use the file
> > system commands.  Plug a floppy into the drive, and format it by typing:
> >
> >    mkfs /dev/fd0
> >
> > you would then mount the drive to the floppy directory by typing:
> >
> >    mount /dev/fd0
> /floppy
> 
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