Yatsen Ng wrote:
On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, you wrote:
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.
Glad you got this sorted. There was no way you could have pulled that kernel off the floppy without copying the whole floppy...
My mistake - it does show 2.2.14. I do get a lot of error messages though: modprobe: modprobe: Can't open dependencies file /lib/modules/2.2.14/modules.dep (No such file or directory)
You also need to copy over the modules directory. After that you'll probably want to run the command 'depmod -a' to update the dependencies file that it's looking for.
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>.
Have fun, Chris -- Apologies to everyone who has been waiting for replies off me over the past few weeks - I've been away from my computer. I'll try to catch up with my email over the coming days, but don't be surprised if you get a reply in a month's time... __ _ -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Chris Reeves /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ICQ# 22219005 _\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ -- 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/