The formating can be done under Linux. I quote from
this link ;
The downside is that these 1722K floppies are somewhat difficult to
create and read in a standard way. WinNT can't read them. 9x and 2K
apparently can, but creating them requires a special utility. Linux can
read and create them, but you need to "fdformat /dev/fd0u1722" to create
them and you should "mount /dev/fd0u1722 /mnt/floppy" instead of using
the /dev/fd0 autodetection device--auto doesn't always work for these.
I suggest you download a copy of
Knoppix and then boot this and then use it to carry out the operation. You can also write the image to the disk with Knoppix using the command dd if=/<source directory> of=/dev/fd0u1722.
But then of course you could set up a Linux based server and use samba to connect the server to W32 boxes and you wouldn't have to pay for anything
