What is the general theory of formatting a floppy diskette?
Floppy disks have 2 levels of formatting: a “low level” format which determines how the little ones and zeroes are stored on the diskette. This has to do with tracks and sectors and stuff like that. Once the low level format is done, diskette controllers handle it and it becomes very uninteresting to end users. The only thing you need to know is that if you have a raw diskette, you have to make sure this low level format is created. In almost all cases it will be pretty clear if the low level format is faulty, because just about nothing will work. The second “high level” format refers to the filesystem. The filesystem takes care of file names, permissions, directory structures and that sort of thing. For most purposes, you will want your floppy disk to have a DOS or “FAT” filesystem on it. These can be read both by Windows and Linux machines. If you only use Linux machines, you may wish to format your diskettes as ext2 but you will probably be the only person on the planet who do
