DESCRIPTION

fdformat does a low-level format on a floppy disk. device is usually one of the following (for floppy devices the major = 2, and the minor is shown for informational purposes only):

        /dev/fd0d360  (minor = 4)
        /dev/fd0h1200 (minor = 8)
        /dev/fd0D360  (minor = 12)
        /dev/fd0H360  (minor = 12)
        /dev/fd0D720  (minor = 16)
        /dev/fd0H720  (minor = 16)
        /dev/fd0h360  (minor = 20)
        /dev/fd0h720  (minor = 24)
        /dev/fd0H1440 (minor = 28)

        /dev/fd1d360  (minor = 5)
        /dev/fd1h1200 (minor = 9)
        /dev/fd1D360  (minor = 13)
        /dev/fd1H360  (minor = 13)
        /dev/fd1D720  (minor = 17)
        /dev/fd1H720  (minor = 17)
        /dev/fd1h360  (minor = 21)
        /dev/fd1h720  (minor = 25)
        /dev/fd1H1440 (minor = 29)

The generic floppy devices, /dev/fd0 and /dev/fd1, will fail to work with fdformat when a non-standard format is being used, or if the format has not been autodetected earlier. In this case, use setfdprm(8) to load the disk parameters.

OPTIONS

SEE ALSO

fd(4), setfdprm(8), mkfs(8), emkfs(8)

AUTHOR

Werner Almesberger (almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch)

AVAILABILITY

The fdformat command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.