USB floppy drives aren't formatted correctly

[David Given]

Binary package hint: nautilus

If you connect a USB floppy drive, insert a disk, and pick the Format... option off the menu, the the disk is not formatted.

What it does instead is just do a mkfs on the disk. This is correct for devices like USB keys or hard drives, but floppy disks have to be low-level formatted before you can make a filesystem on them. In particular, if you buy a blank floppy disk then it needs to be low-level formatted before use.

There is a tool, ufiformat, that will low-level format a USB floppy drive. It's in Ubuntu. (Disclaimer: I am the Debian maintainer for it.) This can be used to format the disk before mkfs is called on it.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Nov 6 00:14:39 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: nautilus 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: nautilus
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686

[malev (marcosvanetta)]

Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to make Ubuntu better.
I'm not quiet sure if what you submitted is really a bug, problem or an idea to impreve Ubuntu. I'm going to check in the Bugsquad list.
As soon as I get some information I'll be posting it here.
Regards
malev

[David Given (david.given)]

I'm pretty sure it's a bug: if you insert an unformatted disk and ask Nautilus to format it, it'll fail. If you insert a formatted disk with some non-standard format --- my USB floppy drive supports a format with 1kB sectors, for example --- Nautilus will claim to succeed but the disk won't actually be mountable. Some formats will actually seem to work, but the disks won't be readable if you try to use them in a non-Linux based computer.

[malev (marcosvanetta)]

Hi David,
You're right, it is a bug, but first we need to confirm it. Now I'm at work, but as soon as I get home I'm gonna ask at the ubuntu's IRC chat room if there is someone with the same experience. I don't have any floppy drive to confirm the bug.
Regards
malev

[malev (marcosvanetta)]

This bug is not really from nautilus, because it does not take care of the format utility.
The bug it really correspond to the Gnome Disk Utility package.
Regars
malev