On Wednesday 12 May 2004 02.18, Stephen W wrote:
Well, I am learning... and formating floppies is one thing I am working on ... (oops, excuse that preposition at the end of a sentence) :)
Here is what I got from the shell command (a little humor and an unuseable command)
winstephen@linux:~> format /dev/floppy Error: The DOS concept of formatting disk media is screwed. If you want to create a filesystem use "mkfs". To format a floppy, use "fdformat /dev/fd0" and then "mkfs.minix /dev/fd0". winstephen@linux:~> fdformat /dev/fd0 | mkfs.minix /dev/fd0
Oh, don't use | there. the pipe will take the output from the command before the sign and use it as input to the command after. While it might not do any harm in this particular case, it's probably not what you want to do. If you want to have two commands on the same line, use && to separate them.
bash: mkfs.minix: command not found winstephen@linux:~> fdformat /dev/fd0 Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB. Formatting ...
When I tried to do the mkfs.minix .dev.fd0 as a stand alone I got the same error message:
command not found... and the shell told me to do it.
I know it says that, but it's not a very good suggestion, unless you're only going to use the floppy in linux systems. If you want the disk to be readable in a windows machine, you want to use /sbin/mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0 But if you have the floppy disk icon on your desktop, you can also just right-click on it and select Actions->format