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low level(physical) formatting tool on usb-fdd (linux)

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tedigh/ufiformat

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The web page of this program was originally hosted by geocities.jp, which will be closed by March 2019.
Here is a copy of that to keep it accessible in the future.
No longer maintained.

This is formatting disk utility for USB floppy devices.

Usage: ufiformat [OPTION]... [DEVICE]
Format a floppy disk in a USB floppy disk DEVICE.

  -f, --format [SIZE]  specify format capacity SIZE in KB
                       without -f option, the format of the current media will be used
  -F, --force          do not perform any safety checks
  -i, --inquire        show device information, instead of performing format
                       without DEVICE argument, list USB floppy disk devices
  -v, --verbose        show detailed output
  -q, --quiet          suppress minor output
  -h, --help           show this message

NOTE: ufiformat supports only the following format capacities.
         1440/1232/1200 (for 2hd disk)
         720/640        (for 2dd disk)
      The device should support the capacities also,
      otherwise ufiformat shows an error message.

      The above format capacities are predefined in the program, but
      each usb floppy device also has a limited set of formats (defined internally)
      that it can format media to.  The allowed format capacities are obtained by
      querying the device, but this only returns the total format capacity
      and not CHS (cylinder, heads and sectors), hence a mapping is
      required in the program.

This program is based around the following document:
  "Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class - UFI Command Specification"
  Revision 1.0 December 14 1998
  http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/usbmass-ufi10.pdf

Currently it is known to work under the following environment.
  * Plamo Linux 4.0.2(kernel 2.6) + YE-DATA USB-FDU(OEM)
  * Plamo Linux 4.0.2(kernel 2.4) + YE-DATA USB-FDU(OEM)
  * SuSE-10 + TEAC FD-05PUB(OEM)
  * Linux Zaurus SL-C700(kernel 2.4) + REX-CFU1 + YE-DATA USB-FDU
    (some kernel modules and recent libext2 are needed)