How to enter and exit the BIOS or CMOS setup.Įliminating possible conflicts with other hardware.

Most computers need to have the floppy setup as a 3.5, 1.44 MB. If the floppy drive is not set up properly, you may experience read/write errors or the floppy may not work at all. Verify the floppy drive is properly configured in BIOS setup. If other floppies work, you may have a bad floppy diskette.

Verify that other floppy diskettes are not exhibiting the same issue. If you do not have a tab, place tape over this hole.īecause of the technology of floppy diskette drives, the floppy diskettes ist most likely bad. Verify the diskette is not write protected by sliding the tab into the opposite position, preventing light from shining through it. Verify the floppy diskette you are attempting to read from is not write protected or bad. For floppy read errors see: Why can't my computer read a floppy diskette? Bad floppy diskette with drives that plug in to the motherboard floppy connectors.) It is not able to work with USB floppy drives.The troubleshooting options and details below are for floppy disk drive issues and not for issues about being unable to read one or two floppy disks. Likewise using dd to write an image to the disk won't work until the disk has been formatted first.įdformat is only designed to work with PC-style floppy controllers (e.g. You will of course have to use these programs to put a filesystem onto the floppy, after you have formatted it with ufiformat. If the disk has not been formatted (or has Amiga or other non-DOS data on it) then these programs will fail. Mkfs.msdos and mformat do not actually format a disk, they simply write a DOS (FAT12) filesystem onto an already formatted disk. Here is some other information I found on my journey:

This formats a 1.44MB floppy ( -f 1440) in verbose mode ( -v) using the USB floppy device at /dev/sdd. This is done with the ufiformat program, which is specifically designed to work with USB floppy drives. This required a proper format, and not just writing a filesystem to the disk, because there were no sectors on it yet. I have just successfully formatted a completely blank floppy in a USB drive.

How to format a floppy disk