Introduction

The fdutils package contains utilities for configuring and debugging the Linux floppy driver, for formatting extra capacity disks (up to 1992K on a high density disk), and for sending raw commands to the floppy controller.

Fdutils includes the following items:

superformat: formats high capacity disks of (up to 1992k for high density disks or up to 3984k for extra density disks)
fdmount: automatically mounts/unmounts disks when they are inserted/removed.
xdfcopy: formats, reads and writes OS/2's XDF disks.
MAKEFLOPPIES: creates the floppy devices in /dev
getfdprm: prints the current disk geometry (number of sectors, track and heads etc)
setfdprm: sets the current disk geometry
fdrawcmd: sends raw commands to the floppy driver
floppycontrol: configure the floppy driver
General documentation about the floppy driver

Version 5.0 of fdutils introduced a new uniform representation of floppy formats which is shared by both superformat and setfdprm. Media descriptions are now represented as a series of keyword=value pairs, which should make them a lot easyer to use. With the help of its new drive-speed measuring feature, superformat has also become more reliable for high capacity formats.

Important Note: The fdutils are meant to control a legacy (FDC-based) floppy drive. They won't work with other types of floppy drives (such as LS-120, USB floppy drives). For USB floppy drives, there is a different set of utilities, however: LOW LEVEL FORMATTING LINUX TOOL ON USB-FDD (Usb floppy)