Thanks, that seems to help. Perhaps having it on "auto" sets up a
> Catch-22, wherein a floppy that needs to be formatted cannot be due to
> the requirement of the program having to determine the file system first
> (which requires that it be formatted). Or maybe not. Anyway, I've had
> better luck with floppies after making your suggested change; so, thanks
> again.
You shouldn't have to mount a floppy if you're going to format it.
To clarify, I was not in any way suggesting that floppies should be
mounted to be formatted. In fact, floppies that I can mount and use
have already been successfully formatted, and don't need subsequent
formatting. So, when I was unable to mount and use a disk, I wanted to
format it to make it usable.
When the file system type for /dev/fd0 was set at "auto", the computer
would frequently complain, when I had an unmountable disk, that it could
not determine the file system type. Subsequent efforts to format,
and/or fix the disk via superformat, failed. Changing the file type
line of "/dev/fd0" in /etc/fstab from "auto" to "vfat" left the machine
with no question as to what the file system type of the disk was; hence,
I believe, it overcame that hurdle to identify other errors (bad block,
etc), and, more often than before, I was able to format and make the
disk usable.
You are correct, and I agree, that mounting a floppy is definitely not
required to format it.
Mark
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