[NBLUG/talk] Floppy disk is inactive.

[Andrew]

Ian Sutherland wrote on Thu, 19 Aug 2004 06:45:06 -0700:

> Thanks, Andrew and Lincoln, that worked. You described what I
> did, pretty closely, to create the problem.

Ah. In that case, a crash course in "dd" and floppy images might
be useful. If you have a 1440k floppy image sitting on your hard
disk and you want to write it to a floppy disk, pop a blank
floppy (or one whose contents you don't care about) into the
floppy drive and type this at a command prompt:

dd if=/path/to/floppy-image of=/dev/fd0

You may need to be root to do this, but try as a mere mortal
first. If all goes well, dd will spit out the message
"2880+0 records in, 2880+0 records out".

Conversely, if you have an important floppy disk and you want to
make a bit-for-bit copy of it to your hard disk, use this
command:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/path/to/floppy-image

Again, try as a mere mortal first; switch to root only if you
have to. dd should respond with the same message. You can then
write the resulting image to another floppy, archive it on
CD-R(W), email it to friends or enemies, edit it with a hex
editor, mount it as a loopback device, or do anything else
you damn well please with it.

By the way, in the dd commands above, "if" means "input file" and
"of" means "output file".

Hope this helps you or someone else.

A.


> On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 19:06, Andrew wrote:
> 
> > Ian Sutherland wrote on Tue, 17 Aug 2004 15:15:37 -0700:
> > 
> > > [root at localhost dev]# ls -l fd0
> > > -rw-rw----  1 isutherl floppy 1474560 Aug 16 07:34 fd0
> > 
> > Aha! There's the problem. Somehow you've managed to replace
> > the block special device /dev/fd0 with a regular file. As it
> > turns out, that file is exactly the size of one 1440k floppy
> > disk. And I see the new file is owned by isutherl, not root.
> > isutherl, a mere mortal, should not be able to replace a
> > device file which is(or should be) owned by root. Would I be
> > right in guessing that you were trying to write a floppy
> > image file onto a floppy disk, and that, as root, you copied
> > the file from isutherl's $HOME to/dev/fd0? That's one way to
> > end up with what you've got now.