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