Using Your 3.5-Inch Floppy Disk Drive

Operating the Floppy Drive

Formatting a New Diskette

If you have floppy diskettes that have been previously formatted using the mediainit utility, you can skip this section. Otherwise, you must always format a new floppy diskette with the mediainit utility before using the diskette. To format a new floppy diskette, follow these steps:

1.Log in as root.

2.Make sure that the write-protect tab on the floppy diskette is in the write position, as shown in Figure 3-2.

3.Insert the diskette into the floppy disk drive.

4.Type the following at the prompt and press Enter:

mediainit -f 16 devicefile

where 16 is the High Density (HD) format option and devicefile is the device file as listed by SAM. See the section “Using Device Files” in this chapter. For a listing of format options, see the floppy manual page. To view this manual page, type the following at the prompt and press Enter:

man floppy

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Chapter 3