You might want to start with Wikipedia's 'Floppy disk format' page and continue from there using all the keywords already present in your question (maybe plus MFM). MS-DOS uses whatever the BIOS can handle. Remember, when you format a disk, any existing information contained on the disk is lost. 1 Beside asking for a link only answer, there is no MS-DOS low level format. Give the name of the 'drive letter' as an argument of the disk to be formatted. To format a floppy disk for DOS, writing an empty MS-DOS filesystem to the disk in the process, use mformat, which is in the mtools package: aptitude install mtools Then format the floppy: mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0

mke2fs /dev/fd0įirst, you will need to install the dosfstools package: aptitude install dosfstools If you want a blank Linux formatted floppy, then you can use the command mke2fs. If you are using the second floppy drive, then just replace /dev/fd0 with /dev/fd1 in these instructions. The first floppy drive in Linux is /dev/fd0 and the second one is /dev/fd1. In Linux, you can format a floppy disk as a DOS disk or a Linux disk.

Dos formated floppy disk