Tips for working with USB floppy drives

I was just wondering if anyone had any tips on working with USB floppy drives in Archlinux.
One thing I've noticed is that trying to use mkfs.msdos on my USB floppy drive directly doesn't seem to result in a usable disk (it's mountable, but reports that I don't have enough space available to copy files), but if I use the command on an image file the same size as a floppy disk and then use dd to copy the blank image to my USB drive I get a disk that's perfectly usable.  Anybody know what the deal is with that or how I might be able to successfully format a disk in fewer steps (other than keeping the blank images around and just using dd to format the floppies, haha)?
Also, I'd like to hear any other tips or tricks any of you have for working with USB floppy drives.  They just seem so much more usable under Windows as opposed to Linux, and that disappoints me a little.

jmetal88 wrote:Okay, thanks guys.  I haven't figured out the issue yet, but you're helping me narrow it down.  I decided to run a df -h command after each try of formatting the disk this time.  I tried the low-level ufiformat command followed by a mkfs.msdos on the device, using a 720k disk, and df -h showed 700k free on the file system.  It's just not making the file system large enough (I believe the file I was trying to copy over was 710k or so).  When I run mkfs.msdos on a 720k disk image and then dd the image over to the drive, df -h shows 713k free after mounting the drive.  Any idea why mkfs.msdos isn't filling out the full 720k on the disk itself, but is on the image?
I would assume this happens because (as far as I can tell from skimming through the source over the course of a few minutes) mkfs.fat only applies floppy size heuristics to fd and lo devices -- your USB floppy drive is treated as a hard drive, and that leads to less-than-ideal default parameters. Run
fsck.fat -v
on the more spacious filesystem to figure out what options need to be set when you attempt formatting an actual disk. Or just make things easier by keeping newly-formatted blank disk images on hand so that dd and (maybe) ufiformat are all you need to worry about.

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