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Old 02-18-2008, 01:52 PM   #1
John-in-France
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Question Formatting Floppy Discs


First let me say that this isn't a big deal but the perfectionist nut in me can't explain why I can't format a floppy disc in Fedora 8.

I am new boy to Linux so please bear with me if I am missing something obvious. Please don't feel that you have to shield me from feeling foolish!

My setup is based on a Gigabyte GA-G1975X-C motherboard running a 3.5Ghz Dual core. 2GB ram.

From way back I have kept my 1.4mb 3.5" floppy drive and just once in a while using it is the easiest way to move a small file from one place to another. Reading and writing to the disc isn't a problem. Formatting is!

Having RTFM'd the info on "floppy" my command line appears to be simply "floppy -f". If I do that, I get

"[root@Nimitz john]# floppy -f
floppy 0.16 Copyright 2001-2006, Double Precision, Inc.

Usage: floppy [OPTION...]etc....
-----
Help options:
-?, --help Show this help message
--usage Display brief usage message"

And nothing happens

If I use "Kfloppy", I get an error "Internal error: device not correctly defined"

I've used "floppy -r" and created /etc/floppy with the following as output: "floppy A /dev/fd0"

Doesn't seem to help.

Please tell me what I've missed in my setup.

John
 
Old 02-18-2008, 02:15 PM   #2
jailbait
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Try this command:

mkfs -c /dev/fd0 1440

See:

man mkfs

----------------------
Steve Stites
 
Old 02-18-2008, 02:50 PM   #3
John-in-France
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That worked!

Thanks Steve,

That worked. I'll now RTFM "mkfs" as suggested. Outstanding issue is how to let "john" write to disc rather than just "root". "chmod"?

John
 
Old 02-18-2008, 03:08 PM   #4
jailbait
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John-in-France View Post
Thanks Steve,

Outstanding issue is how to let "john" write to disc rather than just "root". "chmod"?

John
You can change that in /etc/fstab. Her is my fstab entry for /dev/fd0:

/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

Fedora may not use /media/flopp0 as the floppy mount point so that part of the fstab line might have to be changed to whatever Fedora uses.

----------------------
Steve Stites
 
Old 02-18-2008, 03:20 PM   #5
John-in-France
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Thanks again Steve,

I had a line fairly similar in fstab for the floppy but Fedora's boot routine did't seem to like it unless there was media loaded and I rarely had a disc in the drive. I assume the issue is that Fedora 8 auto mounts all file systems?

Of course had I had "noauto" on the line, that problem goes away. Obvious when someone helpful points it out!


John

Last edited by John-in-France; 02-18-2008 at 03:24 PM. Reason: Missed something!
 
  


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