Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I am having trouble formatting a 1.44 MB internal IDE diskette.
(I've been asked get rid of my old diskettes - so I am hoping to either sell them or give them away to anyone who might still need them)
I can access it, read and write, erase contents but I cannot format it for some reason.
I have used the Puppy Floppy Format utility that I downloaded as a pet but it returns an error that it cannot format due to write protection.
It is not write protected.

Using the terminal I also get the following error:

# sudo mkfs.fat -a /dev/fd0 1440
mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
attribute "partition" not found 

I have used

mkfs -t msdos /dev fd0 1440

and other derivatives but get the same error.

I am using bionic pup 32 v8.0.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Are you talking about 5.25" and 8" floppy discs or 3.5" floppies?

I assume you are talking about the 3.5" floppies.
I assume you know this, but to make sure.

To tell if a floppy disk is write-protected (locked), look at the underside of the disk (the part that's on the bottom when you put the disk in the drive).
On one corner, there should be a sliding tab.
If you hold the disk so that the edge that goes into the drive is at the bottom, this should be in the top left corner.
If the movable part of the sliding tab is up, so that there's a hole in that corner of the disk, the disk is write-protected.
If the movable part of the tab is down, the disk is write-enabled.

Sometimes the little "slider switch" on 3.5" floppies were removed (to make the floppy permanently read-only). If that's the case, then just put a small piece of opaque tape over the "hole" (where the slider switch was) ... and you will be able to write to the floppy.

Please note that the 3.5 inch floppies came in various capacities (the two most common were 720 KB and 1.44 MB. If you hold the floppy so you are looking at the back, then there will be a hole on the bottom LEFT that is used to tell the drive what the floppy disk's capacity is. If memory serves me correctly, there will be a hole at the bottom LEFT (when viewing the back of the disk), for disks with 1.44 MB capacity, and if no hole exists on bottom LEFT, then the floppy is 720 KB.

To be even more clear, both protruding corners should have a hole in them if it is a "hi-density" floppy (1.44mb). It will need a partition table, and you will need to format it as fat16.

maybe it's the sudo command?

Happy New Year ! and thanks! to all who replied. The write protection tab on the diskette was not engaged i.e. left open.

An odd thing after shutting down for the day and coming back to this.
The following command 'sudo mkfs.fat -a /dev/fd0 1440' now seems to work despite the error message that the "partition" is not found. Before I could still access the diskette's contents after mounting it. Now they are no longer there. However the process is quick like a delete process instead of a full format process - you dont really hear any diskette churn (if you can follow what I mean). I have an old Win2K laptop with a floppy disk drive and formatting the FD goes through a whole churning process with final option to label the FD. I've tested the puppy formatted FDs on the Win2k and all seems fine.

I am still dubious about the puppy formatting process using the terminal command. Especially when the Puppy Floppy Format utility thinks the FD is write protected.

All this to say, and I have mentioned it before, is bionicpup 32 v8.0 19.03 a bit unstable ?

I used DOSBox and formatted floppies using Norton Commander which seemed to work pretty good. That is with DOSBox on either Bionic32 or Bionic64. Also what worked was an external Floppy Drive connected via USB and formatted using a Windows XP virtual machine in VirtualBox running on a Bionic64-8.0 with the USB devices passed through to VirtualBox and WinXP

DOSBox is easy to get running and works really well in Puppy Linux and lots of DOS programs are around for free.

One could write a DOS batch script that would format an entire stack of floppy disks semi-automatically.

# sudo mkfs.fat -a /dev/fd0 1440
mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
attribute "partition" not found

I'm presuming that your computer uses a "vanilla" (if I could call it that) FDD connector in which case the device would be /dev/fd0 or sometimes /dev/fd1. In which case the 1440 would be omitted:

mkfs.fat -a /dev/fd0

In my case, I use a USB connected FDD so the device is typically /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc