![](http://pdfasset.owneriq.net/0/aa/0aa0cf7b-a1d3-4414-8b3e-13731920627e/0aa0cf7b-a1d3-4414-8b3e-13731920627e-bg51.png)
65
Using Your 3.5-Inch Floppy Disk Drive
Operating the Floppy Drive
Formatting a New Diskette
You must always format a new floppy diskette with the mediainit utility
before using it. To format a new floppy diskette follow these steps:
1 Log in as root.
2 Make sure that the write-protect tab on the floppy diskette is in the write position,
as shown in Figure 22.
3 Insert the diskette into the floppy disk drive.
4 In a terminal window, execute mediainit with an interleave of 2 by entering the
following:
mediainit -i 2 devicefile
where devicefile is the device file as listed by sam .