KFloppy Disk Formatter

[BobGuy]

KDE has a nice utility to format the glacially slow floppy disk. I never gave it much thought because I seldom ever use a floppy disk anymore, let alone format them. They are slow, limited in the amount of data they can hold (1MB), and almost worthless these days, and the media is not reliable over time.

KFloppy is the GUI utility and unless a distribution has arbitrarily deleted it, I think it's safe to say that everyone who has KDE will have this utility.

Today I finally had a reason to format a floppy disk.

Open the KFloppy utility then pop in a floppy disk into the floppy drive.
Setup it up and click on the Format button...

Click on the Continue button.

And that's all she wrote.
If yours completes the formatting, great...
You don't have to do a thing.
Otherwise the journey begins here.

Cannot access /dev/fd0u1440
Now this is a clue!
Time to check if fd0u1440 even exists, at the Konsole.

No such file or directory. It doesn't exist.
But /dev/fd0 does.

Time to open up a New Root Shell and create it.

Type in your root password.
change directory to /dev
create the symlink.

ln -s source destination is the command.
You can see here that I got this backwards, but no harm was done.
fd0 is the source and fd0u1440 is the destination.
Now when the floppy formatter goes looking for fd0u1440 it will point it to fd0.

Time to test this out, click on the Shell tab.
Type in: ls -l /dev/fd0u1440
Yes here it is ready to go.

Now that the symlink has been created, will the formatter work?
Click on the Format button again.

Low-level format error: What the hell?

[BobGuy]

Time for more clues, and /etc/fstab is the place to go next.
Click on the Shell tab and type in cat /etc/fstab

Well there it is, it's fd: H1440 it's what the floppy formatter is looking for.
So create another symlink and test it out again.

Click on the Root Shell tab and...
Use ln -s fd0 fd0H1440 and hit the enter key, bam, it's a done deal.
Click on the Shell tab, and have a look.

Type in: ls -l /dev/fd0H1440
Great it's in there pointing to-> fd0 and ready to use.
Back at the KFloppy formatter click on the Format button again.

This time it works like it should.
I have old floppy disks from 1999 so it's no surprise to see...

Low-level formatting error at track 62!
All this means is that the floppy media is bad.
I tossed this one in the trash and inserted another one.
Clicked on Format and this one completed.

All done! My KFloppy formatter now works.

Well it now works until I reboot my computer then it's back to the same old errors. That's because it's using udev and those changes were lost after the reboot. Something more permanent needs to be done.

It's time to do more research and look at the scripts. The script that needs to be edited is in /etc/udev/ which contains the links.conf file. I use Kedit for this task, and for those who just got here, turn off the word wrap in settings-> configure Kedit, before you edit any scripts, or conf files! You have been warned!

It's in here that I needed to add two lines to the file...
M fd0u1440 b 2 0
M fd0H1440 b 2 0

These lines I put between...
M fd0 b 2 0
M fd1 b 2 1

I saved the changes then rebooted the computer.
Now my KFloppy formatter works even after a reboot.

This is what I had to go through to get the KFloppy utility to format floppy disks. As usual YMMV.

(BTW None of these issues exist if you will use the command line to format your floppy disks.)

Now that it is working I'll probably not use it again. I had forgotten just how glacially slow formatting floppy disks can be! USB flash drives are going for about 10 bucks this time of year, they are faster, hold more data, and most likely will hold that data without corruption longer than a floppy disk will, and they are easier to carry around with you. With CD-R/RW and or DVD±R/RW, home networking, ISP web space etc... the floppy drive should be just another rusty artifact in the land fill.