Formatting Exercise

Class Exercise

Formatting a Floppy Disk

How do you format a floppy disk?

You need a blank floppy disk to carry out this exercise or a disk which contains data you will not mind LOSING.

Insert your floppy disk into your floppy drive
Open up My Computer. You should see a floppy disk icon displayed.

Click once on the icon so it is selected. On the My Computer > File menu you should see the command Format...

Click the Format... command. You should see the dialog box below.

Is the capacity correct? Can you change this?

What does the file system FAT mean?

What does the Volume Label mean. Try changing the volume label to your name for example.

What does the Quick Format option do?

Note: Don't select the MS-DOS startup disk option or files will be copied to your floppy disk that allow you to boot up the computer

As soon as you click the Start button, disk formatting will commence and if the disk has any data on it, ALL of the data will be lost.
When formatting is finished, check the disk in My Computer. Double-click the floppy disk icon and you will see that the disk is empty.