How To Format a Floppy Disk Cary NC

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Floppy drives are rapidly going the way of the dinosaurs. Most laptops don't even have floppy drives installed anymore. But for moving small amounts of data to and from a legacy system, a floppy is indispensable. This article will show you two ways to format a 3.5" floppy disk on a Windows system. Remember: Formatting is a destructive act. Once you reformat a drive, you will NOT be able to get the old data back. You can only put data on a formatted drive, but if there is already data there, and you format the disk, the data will be gone.

1. First, identify what kind of floppy disk you have. Look at the back, where you will see the round aluminum hub in the center. The front is where the label is (or where the label goes). At the upper left corner of the back is a rectangular hole with a square of plastic in it that can slide up and down. This is used to write-protect the disk. If you slide the plastic square to the bottom, so that the square hole on the front is blocked, you can write to the disk. If you slide the square up so that light can pass through the square hole, the disk is write-protected.
   
   You will not be able to format or otherwise write to the disk if the hole is open. If the plastic square is missing, and the hole is open, you cannot write to the disk unless you cover the hole with a label or a piece of masking tape or something that blocks light. At the upper right (still looking at the back of the disk), you may see another square hole. If you do, then you have a Double-Sided High Density disk (DSHD). A DSHD floppy holds 1.44 MB of information. It also has an "HD" stamped into the front by the aluminum shutter. If you look at it upside down, it looks like a "CH." If there is no hole on the right side of the back, then it is a Double-Sided Double Density disk (DSDD), and it holds 720K of data.
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Author: Charles Clendenen