Hello,
This person's response is a sure-fire way to do what I wanted to
do:
From REPOND_at_elsic.epfl.ch Wed Apr 5 12:19:48 1995
If you have a 1.44Mb floppy, you have to do the following:
1) /sbin/fddisk -fmt -f /dev/rfd0a
2) /sbin/newfs /dev/rfd0a rx26hd
(replace rx26hd by rx26 if you have a 2.88Mb floppy)
3) mount /dev/fd0a /mnt
This works very well. You can actually fsck the floppy and treat it
just like a normal UNIX filesystem disk.
Only trouble is that you need to be root to use mount. The idea was
to allow users at a workstation to copy whole hierarchies to the floppy
device by being able to mount it.
The workaround for that is to treat the floppy like a tape device,
give users permissions to /dev/fd0a, and use tar or cpio to transfer
data to the floppy. This tar command works really well for transferring
directories over multiple disks:
tar -cvf /dev/fd0a -S 2880b myhierarchy ... ...
The "2800b" refers to the size of the 1.44Mb floppy, as it is 2880 512-byte
blocks large.
The other way to go is to have users use the MTOOLS package (available on
lots of places, try gatekeeper.dec.com), and treat the disk like a DOS
disk. This has the added flexibility that you can read your UNIX files
from DOS and vice-versa, but the drawback is having to clip all your names
down to 8 characters, and going on a Virgilian quest to copy contents
of directories over there.
Thanks to all who responded.
Russ Fink
Received on Wed Apr 05 1995 - 16:11:03 NZST