how to reformat floppies that have data on them

[Fred Erickson]

On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 19:29 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 April 2007 23:06, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> > Rick Stevens wrote:
> > > For an MS-DOS floppy,
> > >
> > >  #fdformat /dev/fd0H1440;mformat a:
> >
> > I don't think that udev creates anything but the /dev/fd0 for the
> > first floppy with the default settings...
> >
> > Mikkel
> 
> Ok. Udev doesn't come into my equation, as I'm doing this on FC2.
> 
> I've now got a floppy formatted with a low level format using the following.
> 
> [root at localhost djmons]# fdformat -n /dev/fd0H1440
> Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB.
> Formatting ... done
> 
> 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.
> 
> At the moment I feel a bit like grandpa munster (the count) having mislayed 
> his book of spells, and trying to conjure something up by guesswork.
> 
> The floppy drive is almost new, and the floppy discs are Dyson MF2HD, 
> formatted for IBM, double sided, high density, and have hardly been used if 
> at all.
> 
> Mtools version on FC2 is 3.9.9
> 
> Anyone can help with the correct syntax for using mformat to add a filesystem 
> to this low level formatted floppy.
> 
> Very frustrating.
> 
> Nigel.
> 

Would one of the mkfs variants work for this? 


Fred