fdutils 5.5 review

The fdutils package contains utilities for configuring and debugging the Linux floppy driver, for formatting extra capacity disks (up

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 217K Developer: Alain

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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.

Here are some key features of "fdutils":
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.