Formatting A Floppy
| Field | Computing |
| Went Obsolete | 2005, probably earlier |
| Made Obsolete By | CD-R/W, USB flash drives |
| Knowledge Assumed | Using your OS of choice |
| When useful | Dealing with old computers |
Standard warning: Formatting a floppy disk will destroy all the data on it!
Windows 9x/2k/xp:
First of all, you should know the drive letter of the drive that contains the floppy you want to format. This will be “A:” or sometimes “B:” if you have more than one floppy drive on the computer.
Double click on My Computer. When it opens you should have icons for all the drives on your system. One of these will be a floppy drive (it will be either A: or B:). Right click on that and select “Format” from the context menu. If you have formatted this disk before and just want to quickly erase it you can select the “quick format” option, otherwise just hit OK. After a few minutes of writing to the floppy it will be formatted.
DOS
First of all, you should know the drive letter of the drive that contains the floppy you want to format. This is either “A:” or “B:”, depending on whether the drive is the primary or secondary floppy drive.
In DOS you simply use the format command as follows:
“C:\> format a:”
If your drive letter is not A: then replace a: with b:
If you wish to make the floppy bootable, use the format command as follows:
“C:\> format a: /s”
Linux
First of all, you need to know the drive number of the drive that contains the floppy you want to format. This will usually be 0 or sometimes 1 if you have more than one floppy drive on the computer.
Then determine the name of the block device you will be using. Unix convention generally puts it at ”/dev/fd0”, although there may be variations such as ”/dev/floppy” or ”/dev/floppy0”. If you are using the second floppy drive substitute the 0 for a 1.
First you need to low-level format the drive. At the command prompt type this in:
“workstation:~> fdformat /dev/fd0”
This may take some time, as it is rewriting the entire disk. After this you can add a filesystem to it:
“workstation:~> mkdosfs /dev/fd0”
After this process finishes you may mount the floppy and add files to it.
OSX
Attach your USB-attached floppy Drive. Open Disk Utility (in the Utilities Folder). Select your floppy in the column on the left, then select the Erase thumb. Click Erase.
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Select the drive in Finder. Go to the special menu and select Erase Disk. Select what kind of format you want to use and hit OK.
