[ale] MSD format specifier for Linux?

Josh Murrah jmurrah at spaceghost.salug.org
Wed Sep 17 09:12:33 EDT 1997


You can't pull the DMF format disks off by using dd? 

to pull from disk : dd if=/dev/fd0 of=filename
to write to disk  : dd if =filename of=/dev/fd0

As far as the formatting goes I dunno  :)  You could always use a blank
image made with the DOS shareware utility, and dd it when the need arises.

dd pulls data based on blocks/sectors/etc. so shouldn't care about the
format of floppies, I've make DOS bootable disks this way, etc.

Is this right?

Joshua Murrah, jmurrah at salug.org, http://www.salug.org/~jmurrah
--------------------------~~~===<[^]>===~~~------------------------------
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On Wed, 17 Sep 1997, John M. Mills wrote:

> 
> Does anyone know of an appropriate /dev/fd* setup to dump, copy, and
> format Microsoft's 3.5" distribution media (about 1.7 MBy, I believe)?
> I have a DOS shareware item which does this.  For some reason, I can't get
> it to run under Win95. ;^E
> 
> A Linux /dev/fd* would be great, provided 'fdformat' and 'dd' could use it
> , but I don't know how to make one up, nor how to find out the format
> details.  As Microsoft rather obscures the possibility of doing this at
> all, it would be kind of nice to publicize a simple tool to backup the
> Win95 distribution. 
> 
> On that note, is there a disk-format detector for Linux (something like
> Sydex Anadisk, but more general, say)?
> 
>  John M. Mills, Senior Research Engineer   --   john.m.mills at gtri.gatech.edu
>     Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0834
>           Phone contacts: 404.894.0151 (voice), 404.894.6285 (FAX)
>  "The one piece of advice I can give you is, put on sunscreen and wear a hat."
>                           -- Ted Turner, GSU Commencement, Atlanta, 1994
> 






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