GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Format a Floppy

The Gnome tool to format a floppy disk is gfloppy, as shown in Figure 34.1. This can be accessed from Applications-->System Tools-->Floppy Formatter.

Figure 34.1: The Gnome floppy formatter.

From the command line there are several options. You can format the floppy with:

  $ superformat /dev/fd0

Similarly the command:

  $ fdformat /dev/fd0

will also format a floppy, but does not create an file system. A file system can be created with mkdosfs. You could put, instead of a MSDOS file system on the floppy, a Linux file system with:

  $ mkfs -t ext2 /dev/fd0