Superformatting is the process of formatting a
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...
at a capacity that the disk is not designed for.
It can ruin a floppy disk, but it is used in some floppy-based
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
distros to increase the room for
applications
Application may refer to:
Mathematics and computing
* Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks
** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...
and utilities.
muLinux is a notable example of this technique. Another common use (which is not as popular nowadays) was to format
low-density 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch floppies as high-density, or in the case of 3.5-inch disks, even extra-high density (HD-36).
"Notched" disks will usually turn up a lot of bad sectors, especially if the formatted capacity is a considerable (1.5 to 3) number of times higher than intended. Superformatting is usually done with a low-level format (such as "FORMAT /U" in
DOS and "
fdformat
Fdformat is the name of two unrelated programs:
* A command-line tool for Linux that " low-level formats" a floppy disk.
* A DOS tool written in Pascal by Christoph H. Hochstätter that allows users to format floppy disk
A floppy disk o ...
" in Linux.)
References
{{Reflist
Floppy disk computer storage