Superformatting is the process of formatting a

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a 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 with a ...

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 ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

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 ...

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 DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

and " fdformat" in Linux.)

References

{{Reflist Floppy disk computer storage