Floppy disks - ArchWiki

# Floppy disks

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Altough rarely used nowadays, one still might need/want to use a floppy disk (for example, I practice guitar to backing tracks played from my Yamaha keyboard, which has only a floppy disk drive interface). Common tasks with floppies are described bellow, with available tools to accomplish them.

## Installation

### Kernel module

Most of the floppy drives should be supported by stock kernel (mine always were). External USB drives might be an exception - I haven't tested that yet. Module floppy is used as a driver for floppy drives.

As you can see, it comes with the stock Arch kernel.

Module floppy is not loaded automatically by default for me. I load it manually each time I use floppy disk"

    $ modprobe floppy

### Packages

There are two packages in the Arch package repository I know of - dosfstools and mtools. Respective commands belong to these packages (grepped output of pacman -Ql dosfstools mtools):

    dosfstools /sbin/dosfsck
    dosfstools /sbin/dosfslabel
    dosfstools /sbin/fsck.msdos
    dosfstools /sbin/fsck.vfat
    dosfstools /sbin/mkdosfs
    dosfstools /sbin/mkfs.msdos
    dosfstools /sbin/mkfs.vfat
    mtools /usr/bin/amuFormat.sh
    mtools /usr/bin/floppyd
    mtools /usr/bin/floppyd_installtest
    mtools /usr/bin/lz
    mtools /usr/bin/mattrib
    mtools /usr/bin/mbadblocks
    mtools /usr/bin/mcat
    mtools /usr/bin/mcd
    mtools /usr/bin/mcheck
    mtools /usr/bin/mclasserase
    mtools /usr/bin/mcomp
    mtools /usr/bin/mcopy
    mtools /usr/bin/mdel
    mtools /usr/bin/mdeltree
    mtools /usr/bin/mdir
    mtools /usr/bin/mdu
    mtools /usr/bin/mformat
    mtools /usr/bin/minfo
    mtools /usr/bin/mkmanifest
    mtools /usr/bin/mlabel
    mtools /usr/bin/mmd
    mtools /usr/bin/mmount
    mtools /usr/bin/mmove
    mtools /usr/bin/mpartition
    mtools /usr/bin/mrd
    mtools /usr/bin/mren
    mtools /usr/bin/mshowfat
    mtools /usr/bin/mtools
    mtools /usr/bin/mtoolstest
    mtools /usr/bin/mtype
    mtools /usr/bin/mxtar
    mtools /usr/bin/mzip
    mtools /usr/bin/tgz
    mtools /usr/bin/uz

## Common tasks

Here are the commands needed to perform the most common tasks. In all examples, I suppose /dev/fd0 to be the linux device for the floppy drive. By default, all these tasks need to be performed as root (unless you use Sudo or something similar).

### Format

    $ mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0

### Mount

    $ mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /media/floppy

## Troubleshooting

Things like this can happen:

    $ mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0
    mkfs.msdos 3.0.5 (27 Jul 2009)
    mkfs.msdos: unable to get diskette geometry for '/dev/fd0'

Which means: "Get a new floppy." Sorry (happened to my only disk available when writing this..).

## More Resources

- http://www.daniel-baumann.ch/software/dosfstools/ - DOS filesystem utilities (not so verbosely documented IMHO)
- http://www.gnu.org/software/mtools/ - a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from Unix without mounting them

## Todo

- floppy(8)
- fdformat(8)
- recovering a "dead" floppy

Categories:

- Storage
- File systems