how to reformat floppies that have data on them

[Nigel Henry]

On Wednesday 11 April 2007 20:16, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 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.
>
> "mformat a:" should do it.  mtools use DOS- or Windows-like device
> naming conventions, and "a:" is the floppy.

All I get when trying that is as below.

[root at localhost djmons]# mformat a:
plain_io: Input/output error
mformat: Error reading from '/dev/fd0', wrong parameters?

I will have a read of the mtools manpage though.

Thanks for the reply Rick.

Nigel.