how to reformat floppies that have data on them

[Nigel Henry]

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.