Formatted?

[Scarlett]

I have a load of old floppy discs and when I put them in the drive, a message comes up saying "this disc has not been formatted. Do you want to format it now?" What does this mean? And what happens if I say yes?

[pauln90]

I presume these are un used floppies.Formatting is carried out so that the disc is prepared to accept data.

If a disc with information on is formatted all the data will be lost

[Buenchico]

Formatting a disk basically provides a 'structure' which makes it usable by a particular operating system. Back in the days before 'IBM-compatible' computers (=PCs) came to dominate the market, when you bought a box of blank floppy disks they were truly blank (i.e. they were unformatted). Before you could use them, you had to put them into your computer and format them for that particular make. (For example, Atari, Amiga and Commodore computers might each have had their own type of formatting).

More modern floppy disks always come 'pre-formatted', ready for use on a PC. If you've got disks which are showing that they're unformatted, this could be for one of these reasons:
(i) they're really old disks, as described above, which have never been formatted ; or
(ii) they're disks which have been formatted for a different type of computer (so your PC doesn't recognise the formatting) ; or
(iii) they're disks which have become damaged by exposure to a magnetic field (such as being left on top of a monitor) and the formatting has been 'wiped' ;
(iv) your floppy drive is faulty and not recognising the formatting.

Whatever the reason, if you can successfully format the disks, you'll make them available to be used for data storage but you'll also wipe any existing data from them at the same time. If they really are disks from the days when disks were sold unformatted, you should be aware that the earliest floppy disks were 'single-sided' and/or 'single density'. (More recent disks are always 'double-sided, double density'). This means that you won't be able to format them to hold the standard 1.44Mb. (They'll only hold a half, or possibly even only a quarter, of this amount of data).

Chris

[rojash]

You should be aware however that under Windows XP, floppy disk drives are notoriously unreliable, and XP will often tell you that a disk is unformatted when in fact it has data on it that can be read by another machine or particularly another machine running an earlier version of Windows.