Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Peter 'Shaggy' Haywood Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: Floppies - Actual Question Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:55:37 +1000 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 51 Message-ID: <9ue6rl-ig3.ln1@otis.foo> References: <10b00db$3f68s$1@dont-email.me> <68d800e1$0$16840$426a74cc@news.free.fr> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit Injection-Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2025 14:07:39 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="dfddb7ae6b4d61b3eb9bea8ce5e667de"; logging-data="2647894"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+keFhm+0nNyvRP0JxlBsuOp/2iKrP9N9I=" User-Agent: KNode/0.10.9 Cancel-Lock: sha1:T3amb5uGxZLwCFQaIOslO4f649U= Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:75695 Groovy hepcat c186282 was jivin' in comp.os.linux.misc on Fri, 3 Oct 2025 02:21 pm. It's a cool scene! Dig it. > On 10/2/25 04:28, Peter 'Shaggy' Haywood wrote: >> Groovy hepcat c186282 was jivin' in comp.os.linux.misc on Sun, 28 Sep >> 2025 04:17 am. It's a cool scene! Dig it. >> >>> Fooling around with floppies this week, I know >>> you can put a MSDOS-type partition table on them, >>> did it with gparted, but it uses up about 1.2mb. >> >> That's very odd! An MSDOS partition table occupies a small (64 >> bytes) >> part of the MBR (master boot record - the first sector of the disk). >> Perhaps you were looking at the size of th partition itself, not the >> partition table. > > Insert floppy. Run 'gparted'. Select to create > a new MSDOS-type partition table. > > You will find almost ALL of the disk has been > used up. I've just tried that, and I'm getting 1.41MB unallocated. There are no partitions and nothing else filling the space, so the whole disk is unallocated. I can't explain your results, other than maybe the operation failed and you're seeing what was on the disk before. I had problems getting it to work. Gparted seems a little flakey and error prone. Possibly it just doesn't like floppy disks. It took me ages to get a result. I also tried with fdisk, which worked first time. After I did that I fired up gparted again, and it showed the entire disk unallocated. After finally getting gparted to create a partition table on a floppy, the result was exactly the same: all space unallocated. (Note that I removed the partition table created with fdisk before trying again with gparted. Note also that the final attempt with gparted did indeed work, creating a partition table within seconds; whereas previous attempts had either popped up an error dialog after a moment or tried for TWENTY MINUTES before doing so. Ye gads!) So, to summarise: partition a floppy with fdisk or gparted (if you can get it to work) and the disk will show all space unallocated. Make a failed attempt, however, and you may see the space taken up by the file system that was there in the first place. -- ----- Dig the NEW and IMPROVED news sig!! ----- -------------- Shaggy was here! --------------- Ain't I'm a dawg!!