fdutils For Linux

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.