I am having some challenges formatting a floppy disk.
What's happening is, using kfloppy, when I start the format, the drive lights up for a second, but stops and kfloppy shows no progress information, and afterwards the floppy is unreadable by any system I put it in. The same goes when I use the command line.
This seems to be true for both root and regular users (and yes I am in the floppy group)

What's interesting is, I have tried multiple dist's on the 2 machines this problem occurs on.
So far I am having this problem using Mepis, Onebase, Suse and Slax,
BUT I can format just fine in Fedora (1 & 2), blags, JAMD, Libranet and knoppix.

Anyone have this problem or come accross something similar??

Thanks

"I am having some challenges formatting a floppy disk.
What's happening is, using kfloppy, when I start the format, the drive lights up for a second, but stops and kfloppy shows no progress information, and afterwards the floppy is unreadable by any system I put it in. The same goes when I use the command line.
This seems to be true for both root and regular users (and yes I am in the floppy group)"

When you format a floppy the floppy must not be mounted. If you are using supermount then supermount is mounting the floppy as soon as you insert it. So there are two things you can try if this is actually your problem.

Go into /etc/fstab and turn off supermount for the floppy. Then boot to get rid of supermount.
Use mkfs from the command line instead of kfloppy so you can get some decent error messages.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

fdformat claims the floppy is mounted read only, but there is no "ro" in /etc/fstab.
And I tried it from Yast2 which says it is unmounting the floppy, and get the same error.

Welcome to LQ. One other thought -- is the floppy itself write-protected? -- J.W.

mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0
or
mke2fs /dev/fd0

If you really want to format (erase) the disk, do this first.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=2880
then
mke2fs /dev/fd0