On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 03:40:15PM -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote:

At: http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php

the following command is supplied near the bottom:

**fdformat /dev/fd0u1722 **

I have plugged in my USB floppy drive and have a /media/floppy

I get no such file or directory with this command. And what is this with a 1722 formatted floppy. What I do a man fdformat, 1722 is not listed....

I just tried it on Centos-4.4 with a USB floppy drive. It actually goes with my son's laptop, so I've never used it before.

Anyway, I plug it in, stick in a floppy (with stuff already on it) and boom, it mounts and pops up an icon on the screen. Cool!

unfortunately, I can't get fdformat (or 'floppy', either) to format a diskette in it.

When it's mounted I can see:

/dev/sda on /media/floppy type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=fredex)

so I umount it and try:

fdformat /dev/sda

and I get:

# fdformat /dev/sda Could not determine current format type: Invalid argument

Tried the "floppy" command, also to no avail.

The only thing I've unearthed that works for formatting is to use mformat. mformat writes a blank filesystem onto the floppy, BUT THE DISKETTE MUST HAVE PREVIOUSLY BEEN LOW-LEVEL FORMATTED by some other tool.

I added this line to my /etc/mtools.conf config file:

drive z: file="/dev/sda" exclusive mformat_only

and I could then run mformat (or other mtools) against the usb floppy as if it were drive Z:

even though I don't routinely use this device, now that I've gotten into it I'd be interested to know if anyone else knows (or figures out) how to do a real low-level format on a USB floppy.

Fred