Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3104 mails)

[yatsenng@xxxxxxxxxx (Yatsen Ng)]

I did it the correct way (and mounted the floppy the UNIX way - I feel more
comfortable doing it like this) and this time everything went smoothly.  I
copied vmlinuz (2.2.14) to a floppy and copied it from the floppy to /boot on my
other PC. After booting I'll still get the message that I'm running kernel
2.2.10 but that's probably because I installed an image of 2.2.14 rather then
doing it 'the other way', e.g. get the source, compile, etc.
 
On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, you wrote:
> 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@xxxxxxxxxx

It said "Needs Windows 95 or better". So I installed Linux...

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