Can I format a disk in an external floppy drive

[David Fox]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:47 AM, Joep L. Blom <jlblom at neuroweave.nl> wrote:

> So I don't see why a simple format /media/floppy0/ would'nt work.
> (Hardy:  2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Fri Jul 11 21:01:46 UTC 2008 x86_64).

Well, if you did try it, it wouldn't have worked, because you don't
format mount points. And, the floppy can't be mounted if you want to
format it. Formatting floppies is kind of a special case on Linux
anyway. There are a number of devices under /dev/fd0 - at least there
should be - denoting what kind of density the floppy media supports.

Since (I assume) this is a 3.5 1.44 meg floppy you should do something like:

$ sudo fdformat /dev/fdu1440