I have a MAC formatted pack of floppies. Why can't I format them to IBM?

[TheDOSLover]

So I bought a 25 pack of floppies off of Amazon. They were Mac formatted but I assumed I could format to IBM. So I wasted an hour trying to format them to FAT but to no avail. Why?

 

[COLGeek]

Did you flip the little "write protect" switch on the floppy disk itself to the "write" mode (assuming we are talking about 3.5in diskettes)?

 

[wpgwpg]

Floppies? What good are floppies in today's environment when you can buy flash drives for next to nothing, and they're infinitely better in speed, reliability, and capacity. If you want something to give to someone else, there's always CDs which hold 650 MB and cost about a dime each.

 

[TheDOSLover]

To GOLGeek's question, I have tried, but only one could format correctly. I've tried every floppy, and I got an error, "Cannot format. Drive is in write protection. Format failed." How can I tell if it's on write protection mode?

 

[COLGeek]

See here: http://oit.ua.edu/oit/services/it-service-desk/write-protect-a-floppy-diskette/