#26 Cannot format virgin floppy

[john blommers]

When a virgin floppy (no magnetization) is inserted, in version 0.96, we now get, after a very long delay, an option to initialize the floppy disk. Disk utility comes up and eventually you get to try to initialize the floppy. But Disk utility never finishes and it has to be force-quit. The system remains fully stable and usable afterwards ...

Beige G3, Mac OS 10.1.1, 768MB RAM, 60GB HD.

[David A. Gatwood]

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I'm keeping this bug around because of the issue of the long delay.
While it's a known issue, I don't have a bug open on that one. That part
is easily fixed. The primary issue, however, is "someone else's
problem", and cannot be worked around in the driver, to my knowledge,
as it would involve launching a different application when you click
"initialize".

Neither Disk Utility nor the core of Mac OS X support low-level formatting
of devices. They only support partitioning, which is inappropriate for a
floppy. Until Apple resolves this issue, clicking "initialize" will always
result in disk utility running, and subsequently crashing.

There is an external format utility (command-line tool) that allows you
(with a lot of jumping through hoops) to format a disk as MFM (i.e. for
PC floppies or 1.44M Mac floppies). Because the utility is not end-user-
ready, it is not currently shipping, and must be compiled from sources.
End-user release is (tentatively) targeted for version 1.0.