Re: gfloppy: Could not determine current format type

[Joachim Trinkwitz <jtr uni-bonn de>]

Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> writes:

> John Gotts <jgotts@ww2.tqstats.com> writes:
> 
> > I just don't understand why Red Hat includes mtools but not fdutils.
> 
> Huh?  They serve different purposes.  Maybe you meant "fdformat", not
> mtools?  fdformat isn't in mtools.

To quote from the fdutils README file:
\begin{quote}
   This package contains utilities to configure and debug the floppy
  driver, and utilities to format floppy disks.
  [...]
   The fdutils allows you to access some of the extended features of the
  linux floppy driver.
   These include:
   1. Formatting disks with a higher capacity than usual (up to 1992k on
  a 3 1/2 HD disk).
   2. Reconfiguration of the autodetection sequence to automatically
  detect some of these extended formats.
   3. Limitation by the superuser of the highest allowable number of
  tracks.
   4. Access to various internal driver structures, and drive
  configuration using the floppycontrol program.
\end{quote}

If your distro doesn't include fdutils (Debian does, of course) you can
find it at <ftp://www.tux.org/pub/knaff/fdutils/fdutils-5.3.tar.gz>
and various other places.

Greetings,
joachim