Hi Cees, Thank you very much for the advice - this is very cool stuff indeed!
Hello Yatsen,
On Wed, Apr 12, 2000 at 08:32:30PM +0000, Yatsen Ng wrote:
Did you use 'cp /boot/vmlinuz /dev/fd0' or something simulair as root?
Yes
If you did this, you destroyed your filesystem on the floppy. There is no way to mount it...
I'm surprised to hear that - I didn't know about this. However, it sure explains a lot! Why does this distroy the filesystem? I thought this was the way it should be done.
Under Unix, everything is a file. You probably know that you can print with 'cat [file] > /dev/lp0'.
In the same manner you can copy a complete floppy to a file: 'dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/floppy', an image of fd0. To copy this image back to floppy, you can use a command like: 'dd if=/tmp/floppy of=/dev/fd0'.
You can even mount this image under Linux. (I don't know if this is true for all Unix-es.) Try: 'mount -t vfat -o loop,ro /tmp/floppy /mnt/tmp' and you can use this image as a mounted floppy!
(I do this a lot with CD's. If you mount them and them copy them, you don't copy the boot-sector, with the dd-methode, you make an exact copy.)
Even so, a floppy is not 'a normal' file of 1.44MB. It is formated, has entries for directories, etc.
So, if you copy a file to /dev/fd0, it first overwrites record 0 (the MBR with all the formatting information), next record 1, etc. You get the idea...
With other words: you destroyed all formating information!
In the future, use 'mcopy' to copy a file to a floppy. You can do this as a normal user.
Now I'm confused. Someone mentioned before that mcopy is only used to copy files off a DOS formatted device (in this case a floppy).
You shouldn't be... all will be clear in the end... <grin>
A 3.5" floppy with 1.44MB is normally formatted with FAT, i.e. you can use it with MS-Dos, i.e. a Dos formatted floppy. (You can even buy them preformatted in the store.)
The 'Unix' way is to mount the floppy (i.e. mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy) and then copy all files to it and then unmount (with 'umount'; can someone tell me where the N is?) the floppy.
This is a lot of work for something simple as copying some files. So someone wrote the mtools-package a long time ago. Now you can use the floppies as in the good old times of MS-Dos, i.e.
- 'mdir a:'
- 'mcopy [file] a:'
The floppies are called Dos-formatted, but almost all operating systems knows how to read/write them. It is probably the most simple way to exchange files between systems.
Offcourse there are a lot of ways to copy files between systems, but we will keep that for the next lesson <grin>.
Regards, Cees.
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-- Yatsen Ng Den Haag, The Netherlands yatsenng@casema.net It said "Needs Windows 95 or better". So I installed Linux... -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/