Useful Floppies

Useful Floppies

I’m still a floppy user, I’ll admit. You’ll recall from yesterday’s Penguin
Shell that my first computer had only floppies for storage. It’s a long hard
habit to break. In fact, as I’ve moved more and more into Linux and further from

Windows, I’ve found more uses for floppies. Given the lightweight nature of most

Linux programs and scripts, floppies still provide a great medium for
transporting data from one machine to another.

So how do you prepare a floppy for data in Linux? Like Windows, floppies must be

formatted to be used. If you’ve purchased a box of DOS-formatted floppies, you
should have no fear - Linux will recognize them just as it does those formatted
for ext2. In fact, these floppies can be mounted and written using the MS-DOS
format from Linux.

But, suppose you’re copying to a floppy that will be used on a Linux machine.
Formatting is a piece of cake. A single line will make that 3.25″ medium ready
for any Linux machine:

    fdformat /dev/fd0H1440

This command executes the fdformat ([f]loppy [d]isc format)
program on the medium in /dev/fd0 - an unmounted floppy drive. H1440
writes 80 tracks of 18 sectors per track - 1.44 Mb. Used as written above, the
floppy is formatted, then the integrity of the tracks and sectors is verified.
If you’d rather format a bit more quickly, the -n option can be added to
forego the verification process:

    fdformat -n /dev/fdoH1440

This will speed things up, though it won’t warn you of physical problems with
the disk.

Sneakernet may be fading, but with small Linux programs and scripts, it doesn’t
have to be quite dead.