On Tuesday 28 October 2008 15:34, Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@gmail.com> wrote:
2008/10/29 Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com>:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@gmail.com> wrote: <snip>
Only in the past few weeks have I seriously considered switching drive manufacturers, though, after an email exchange with WD in which they say that their product is unsupported under Linux.
That's a curious notion. They obviously must The Western Digital drive I just bought (see below) does include some Mac-specific software that performs the breathtaking function of telling you (in a system menu) how much of the drive is currently occupied by file data _and_ (get this) presents this utilization fraction in a front-panel bar-graph-style display comprising 8 white-light LEDs behind the front panel. All very cute...
The rep went on to clarify that warranty failures would still be replaced, however, things like firmware updates (this is an issue on some WD 2.5" models) and some other tools would only be handled via Windows.
I just bought a 1TB external WD drive. It has a triple interface (eSATA, FireWire and USB) and I got it to use as a kind of roving backup for my Macs and select data from my Linux boxes. I picked it in part because of the multiple interfaces and in part because I trust the WD name. When I bought it there were much better prices on drives whose names I'd never heard before. Those no-name drives may be the best drives in the world. For all I know, they're WD hardware, but when it comes to quasi-commodity hardware items like disk drives, I tend to think that reputation is worth paying attention to.
...
Here's the kicker: the boot floppies are made with a windows-specific tool. ...
I bet they are using a Windows Tool to write a full dos floppy image to the floppy. I've seen that before.
If so, the file they are copying should be about 1.44 MB
This has been my experience on several occasions. It certainly can't hurt to try the simple dd approach (cat image-file >/dev/floppy should work, too). If the disk boots, then you know it was just an image file. Besides, everyone should do this or something like it from time to time to remind themselves of the glacial pace an miniscule capacities of the drives that our forebears (or our former selves) had to make do with...
In Linux, to put that on floppy its just:
dd if=floppy-image-file of=/dev/floppy bs=512
Greg
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