Editing Floppy disk (section)

====Formatting====
{{Main|Disk formatting}}
[[File:Visualization of magnetic information on a Floppy Disk (CMOS-MagView).jpg|thumb|Visualization of magnetic information on floppy disk (image recorded with CMOS-MagView)]]
A blank unformatted diskette has a coating of magnetic oxide with no magnetic order to the particles. During formatting, the magnetizations of the particles are aligned forming tracks, each broken up into [[disk sector|sectors]], enabling the controller to properly read and write data. The tracks are concentric rings around the center, with spaces between tracks where no data is written; gaps with padding bytes are provided between the sectors and at the end of the track to allow for slight speed variations in the disk drive, and to permit better interoperability with disk drives connected to other similar systems.{{fact|date=June 2024}}

Each sector of data has a header that identifies the sector location on the disk. A [[cyclic redundancy check]] (CRC) is written into the sector headers and at the end of the user data so that the disk controller can detect potential errors.{{fact|date=June 2024}}

Some errors are [[soft error|soft]] and can be resolved by automatically re-trying the read operation; other errors are permanent and the disk controller will signal a failure to the operating system if multiple attempts to read the data still fail.{{fact|date=June 2024}}