Floppy formatting utility

This is a Linux utility program that is used to format floppy disks. It is a replacement for fdformat, that works with both the standard floppy controller-connected disk drives, and ATAPI IDE floppy drives (also known as LS-120 drives or "Superdisk" drives). This is a very novice-friendly utility that includes both a command line interface (the floppy command) and a GTK front end (59kb screenshot).

ATAPI IDE/LS-120 format support requires Linux kernel 2.4.10, or higher.

This utility was originally written to support the ATAPI IDE/LS-120 format functionality. Support for the floppy controller-connected disk drives was added in afterwards. This utility is much more novice-friendly than fdformat. For example: the command "floppy --format a:" will format the floppy disk whether the first floppy disk drive is a floppy controller drive, or an LS-120 drive.

Documentation

For additional documentation, see the installed floppy(8) manual page.

Installation

Download the most recent version of the floppy utility from http://floppyutil.sourceforge.net/download.php.

Installation is straightforward:

./configure
make
make install

See README for Fedora and Red Hat installation instructions.

CVS

Anonymous CVS access to the source code is available:

CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@floppyutil.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/floppyutil
export CVSROOT
cvs login                  # Press ENTER when asked for the password
cvs -z3 co floppyutil
./autobloat

NOTE: you need to have autoconf and automake installed in order to build from CVS. The repository does not contain configure, Makefile.in, and other autoconf/automake-generated files. After extracting from CVS, run the autobloat to conveniently create those scripts.

Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@courier-mta.com>