HOWTO: format and use floppy disks

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HOWTO: format and use floppy disks

Posted by Jason on Wednesday October 10, @12:43PM
from the dos-disks-be-damned dept.
If you would like to use a floppy disk with FreeBSD, you can either use a dos formatted disk, or you can format a disk with the ufs filesystem and use it.

This article will show you how to do both.

[Using a dos formatted disk]

To use a dos formatted disk, you just need to mount it. You must be root to issue the mount command. Here is how to mount a pre-formatted dos disk to the generic mount point (/mnt).

mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt

Here is a breakdown of this mount command:

mount: the command to mount a filesystem
-t msdos: specifies the file system type (msdos)
/dev/fd0: the device to mount (your floppy drive)
/mnt: where to mount the filesystem

Once you have mounted the disk, you can copy data to it by copying fils to the /mnt directory with the copy command: cp. Before removing the floppy disk from the drive, you need to unmount it with the umount command:

umount /mnt

[Formatting a ufs disk]

There are three steps to formatting a floppy with a ufs filesystem. You must have root level privileges to perform these tasks.

# fdformat /dev/fd0

Format 1440K floppy `/dev/fd0'? (y/n): y
Processing vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvf... done.

# disklabel -w -r /dev/fd0 fd1440

# newfs -T fd1440 /dev/fd0 fd1440

/dev/fd0: 2880 sectors in 1 cylinders of 1 tracks, 4096 sectors
1.4MB in 1 cyl groups (6 c/g, 12.00MB/g, 736 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
32

To mount your newly created ufs floppy disk, you issue the mount command, but you do not need to specifiy a filesystem type.

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

To unmount the disk, use the umount command as in the previous example:

umount /mnt

Note: before unmounting a disk, you must be in a directory other than the mount point. In our example, you must not be in the /mnt directory. Also, you can specify the device (/dev/fd0) or the mount point (/mnt) when unmounting a filesystem

Hopefully this article clears up some of the confusion around creating and using floppy disks under FreeBSD. If you would like more information on these and other commands, as always I recommend you read the man pages.

man mount
man fdformat
man disklabel
man newfs
man fstab

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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
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Re: HOWTO: format and use floppy disks
by dos head on Monday December 13, @10:06AM

it might be useful to also indicate how to format a dos floppy from freebsd...

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Re: HOWTO: format and use floppy disks
by Johnny on Saturday March 04, @05:02PM

I'm computer illitereate so have no idea of your previous explanation. I go to my Desktop and click on the Disk drive Drive (D:) It tells me dik is not formatted would you like to foramt now. I click yes but it says disk is not formattable. Help!! Johnny

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Re: HOWTO: format and use floppy disks
by LP on Thursday June 19, @11:08AM

This is a walk through specific to Linux and Unix operating systems. What you seem to be describing is Windows.

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