Fast Formatter is a handy freeware program for initializing a batch of floppies. It doesn't ask questions between diskettes; you just feed them in one after the other. Formatting a box of 50 goes fairly quickly.
A nice feature is that Fast Formatter allows you to format a diskette that has bad sectors, if you wish. If Fast Formatter finds bad sectors during formatting, it will display a dialog that says something like "I'm having problems initializing this diskette" with buttons to EJECT it or CONTINUE. If you press CONTINUE, Fast
Formatter will skip the bad sector and keep on initializing the diskette. After it's done, you can insert the bad diskette into your Mac and the Finder will accept it. (Don't be fooled, though; the bad sector is still in there!) But once you've got the diskette successfully inserted in the Mac, you can use a floppy repair program like SUM II to lock out the bad sectors so you can still use the diskette if you like.
Of course, since floppies are pretty cheap these days, you might want to throw a defective diskette away or have it replaced under its "lifetime guarantee." That's up to you, but it's nice to know that Fast Format can help you salvage defective diskettes if you like.
