Floppy Tricks

* Warning: Do not use any of these commands on your "C" drive or you could lose data.

Formatting Floppies - Ever need to format a floppy from Dos? Here are several tricks you can use. For example a standard format which erases a disk and prepares it for use is "format a:" at the command prompt. Be careful not to format C: or all of your hard drive files will be lost! That would be bad.. Formatting a floppy disk takes about a minute but you can speed this up by doing a quick format provided the disk has been full formatted at least once. A quick format does not format a disk but merely erase the files. Much faster than a regular format. To do this type "format a: /q" If you want to create a system disk or a bootable floppy disk as it's sometimes called type: "format a: /s" Try a combination of switches like "format a: /q /s" which will do a quick format & make the disk bootable. If you have a floppy that you don't want formatted but you do want it to be a bootable disk you can also type "sys a:". Pretty cool huh?