Can I format a disk in an external floppy drive

[Joep L. Blom]

Graham Watkins schreef:
> 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,
> 
Sorry! Stand corrected. I used it a few years ago to format floppies for 
the installation of the stand-alone firewall LEAF ( the best in my 
opinion: runs on an old (15 year old) K6 in 12 MB memory since 4 years 
24/7).
The commands were:
superformat /dev/fd0u1680  (to have the maximum of storage space)
or
fdformat /dev/fd0u1680
Then the imagefile with the complete firewall was transferred using
dd if=inputfile of=/dev/fd0u1680.

You can of course use the standard format with /dev/fd0u1440
I had to look it up in an old manual.
Joep