how to reformat floppies that have data on them

[Nigel Henry]

On Wednesday 11 April 2007 20:23, Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> On 4/11/07, Rick Stevens <rstevens at internap.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 19:29 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> > > So far so good, but I'm darned if I can get a filesystem on it using
> > > mformat, and have tried allsorts of incantations. It would be nice if
> > > some of these manpages had a simple example.
> >
> > "mformat a:" should do it.  mtools use DOS- or Windows-like device
> > naming conventions, and "a:" is the floppy.
>
> You could also try b: if you happened to have the drive plugged into
> that port in the cable.
>
> I sure don't miss floppy drives ... until I have to do a BIOS update :[
>
> /Mike

I don't miss them either, but when you are using an ancient machine to run 
your Smoothwall firewall on, and the BIOS can't boot from the cdrom, then 
your stuck with booting from the floppies.

I do have another old machine 133Mhz, which IIRC does boot from cdrom. Perhaps 
I should move the Smoothwall to that. Saying that though it would be nice to 
resolve the mformat problem that I've having.

Nigel.