[lug] floppy drive

[John Karns]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, LittleViggy at alum.manhattan.edu said:

> I just wanted to add that this will "format" the floppy disk in the ext2
> format, i.e. unreadable in Windows.
>
> If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I played with floppy
> disks under *nix), during the install of Slakware, you have the option
> of installing "MSDOS Floppy tools".  This installs a set of tools to
> format the floppy in DOS format, and a couple of other things (I think
> there are commands to make directories, etc. too).

This pkg, usually named "mtools" I believe, also has a set commands to
access the floppy without mounting / unmounting it.  The commands are more
or less the same as the DOS commands, with an "m" prepended - mformat,
mcopy, mdel, etc.  The command to lowlevel format (usually not needed) is
fdformat /dev/fd0.  Depending on how your distro is configured, you may
need to refer to the device as /dev/fd0h1440.  The fdformat command is
distinct from the mtools pkg, BTW.  The caveat is that the mtools commands
are limited to work with a DOS formatted floppy, AFAIK.


> Also, if you want to mount a DOS/WIndows floppy, you need to have the VFAT
> driver compiled into the kernal (or as a module) and might have to:
>
> mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /floppy

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net