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To use KFloppy you must have either a 5.25" or 3.5" disk drive connected to your system. Insert the disk you want to format. Do not mount it. Then, select the appropriate options as described below.
Select the drive that contains the disk you wish to format. For those of you not familiar with
PC drive labelling conventions, letter A:
corresponds to the fd0
device and
B:
is
the fd1
device. Almost all new computers will only have one 3.5" floppy as their A:
(fd0
) drive.
Select the density of the disk you wish to format. Most of the 3.5" and 5.25" disks produced in the last 5 years are high density (HD) disks. Older disks may only support the double density (DD) format. High density disks can be formatted as double density, but you will not be able to use the full 1.44 Mbytes or 1.2 Mbytes of space on the disk. The 800k disk format used by Macintosh floppy drives is not currently supported, and cannot be supported at all on PC floppy drives since they are not capable of formatting disks in that fashion.
Here is a list of the properties for each disk type and density combination:
KFloppy supports two file system types for formatting floppy disks: MS-DOS and ext2, the Linux file system. If you want to use the floppy across many different operating systems, the MS-DOS file system is a good choice, but if you only need to use the disk on Linux systems, use ext2.
There are two different ways that KFloppy can format a disk.
This simply puts the new file system on the disk. All data on the disk is erased. If the density of the disk is different than the selected density for formatting then the tracks and sectors on the disk will be reallocated before the file system is made.
A full format reallocates the tracks and sectors, puts the selected file system on the disk, and then verifies the format, blocking out any bad sectors it finds.
MS-DOS disks can have a volume label, which can be created by checking the Create Label box and typing in the desired volume label. Ext2 formatted floppies cannot have labels.
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