• From: Alaska, USA
  • Registered: 2005-03-27
  • Posts: 843

Topic: cant write to floppy properly

So I was trying to copy some conf files to a floppy on netbsd to take over to a openbsd box. So I did

"mount -t msdos /dev/fd0a /floppy" and then "cp * /floppy/" and I would get errors like

cat : stdout invalid argument, I forget since this was at home but yea it was like that and then sometimes it would copy the files but not with the same name, it would be pf.conf but when it gets written to the floppy its named as pf~1.con , so then i unmounted took disk to openbsd and looked at the floppy and nothing was on there...

any ideas?

For example, Linux had at least two completely independent USB stacks before Linus Torvalds rejected them both and wrote a third one from scratch, after he found both existent Linux  stacks unsatisfactory.  (When pressed for an explanation as to why he selected the API he did, Torvalds stated: "because I wanted to."

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  • Registered: 2005-07-07
  • Posts: 15

Re: cant write to floppy properly

You can just move files over to a floppy like that (I think, atleast). You have to write them.
dd if=file of=/dev/floppyrom bs=1k

Or something in the direction of that.

  • Registered: 2005-05-11
  • Posts: 8

Re: cant write to floppy properly

What you are reporting makes me think that your floppy was either formatted or mounted in DOS (i.e. 8.3 filenames) mode. From the man page for mount_msdos(8):

-l            Force listing and generation of Win'95 long filenames and
                   separate creation/modification/access dates.

                   If neither -s nor -l are given, mount_msdos searches the
                   root directory of the filesystem to be mounted for any
                   existing Win'95 long filenames.  If no such entries are
                   found, -s is the default.  Otherwise -l is assumed.

[...]

-s            Force behaviour to ignore and not generate Win'95 long
                   filenames.  See also -l.

[...]

The default handling for -s and -l will result in empty filesystems to be
     populated with short filenames only.  To generate long filenames on empty
     DOS filesystems use -l.

You should be using something along the lines of 'mount -o -l -t msdos /dev/fd0a /floppy'. BTW I believe there are more "friendly" ways to copy a file to and from a floppy disk than using dd(1)... smile