Can I format a disk in an external floppy drive

[Graham Watkins]

David Fox wrote:
> 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
>
>   

Like I said before, it doesn't work because external floppy drives do 
not answer to fd but rather sdg.  I have solved the problem after a 
fashion using gfloppy although there are still issues insofar as I can 
only do a blanking format not a full one which (judging by the error 
message ie "Could not determine current floppy geometry.") is connected 
to the problems with the partitions as shown in the fdisk -l output (see 
previous mail). 

This might be fixable by using fdisk to recreate a partition and then 
format the disk but this seems to be rather a lot of trouble to go to 
right now.


Thanks for everybody's input.

Cheers,

-- 
Graham Watkins

"To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows
box, you just need to work on it."
SecurityFocus columnist Scott Granneman.