Men in pläk aar päck teör, veör tei spiik finis. Rikaarts, HJK män On Sun, 30 Dec 2001, Richard Bos wrote:
I thought in a blink of an eye to simple backup some files at a floppy disk. It seems more challencing I ever expected. I've some floppies around and use these. I started with formatting it for 1.4 MB, with the following result:
dar:~ # fdformat /dev/fd0u1440 Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB. Formatting ... done Verifying ... Read: : Input/output error Problem reading cylinder 0, expected 18432, read -1
Alright an old floppy use a lower density: dar:~ # fdformat /dev/fd0u720 Double-sided, 80 tracks, 9 sec/track. Total capacity 720 kB. Formatting ... done Verifying ... done
Seems to work fine. Now mount it: dar:~ # mount /dev/fd0 /mnt mount: you must specify the filesystem type
Nothing has been mounted at /mnt before, so that's not the problem. It seems something needs to be done with a tool called: setfdprm. This tool uses the config file /etc/fdprm. The latter contains the following info about 720 FD:
# size sec/t hds trk stre gap rate spec1 fmt_gap 360/360 720 9 2 40 0 0x2A 0x02 0xDF 0x50 360/720 720 9 2 40 1 0x2A 0x02 0xDF 0x50 720/720 1440 9 2 80 0 0x2A 0x02 0xDF 0x50 720/1440 1440 9 2 80 0 0x2A 0x02 0xDF 0x50 360/1200 720 9 2 40 1 0x23 0x01 0xDF 0x50 720/1200 1440 9 2 80 0 0x23 0x01 0xDF 0x50 800/720 1600 10 2 80 0 0x2A 0x02 0xDF 0x2E
It looks like info is missing about 80 track 720kB formatted floppy disks. So I executed: setfdprm -p /dev/fd0 720 9 2 80 0 0x2A 0x02 0xDF 0x50
Though with the same result: dar:/etc # mount /dev/fd0 /mnt mount: you must specify the filesystem type
Q: how can a 720 kB formatted FD be mounted (I can mount 1.4MB formatted FDs)?
System: suse-7.3
fdformat does only low-level format, so what you need to do is create a filesystem on it with mkfs.* (mkfs.msdos, mkfs.ext2 etc.) You might also want to consider using KDE's floppy formatter KFloppy which allows you to specify filesystem, density etc. --Jyry C:-( C:-/ C========8-O C8-/ C:-(