On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 11:29:31AM -0500, Mike McCarty wrote: > Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > >On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 10:24:00AM -0500, Mike McCarty wrote: > > > >>Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > >> > >>[snip] > >> > >> > >>>bootable floppy disk with it. This is different than a windows/dos > >>>made bootable floppy in that it doesn't have any windows or dos system > >>>on it. You use any blank floppy and the rawrite program to copy the > >>>disk image over to the floppy. make sense? > >> > >>I believe that the disc must have been formatted. Unless a low-level > >>format has been done to establish sectors, I don't think dd could > >>write to the floppy. It must also have a BR with a BPB in it, I do > >>believe, else how could it distinguish, e.g. 720K floppy from a 1.44M > >>floppy? If I can find a floppy I am willing to degauss, I'll give it > >>a try... > > > > > >not to argue :) but the debian installer manual chapter 4.3 makes no > > I'm not, either. But the floppy drive has to be told whether > to use high-coercion or low-coercion current drive. Using high-mu > drive on a low-mu disc will likely ruin it. And how can the driver > know what kind of disc is in there?
good point, and I don't know. suffice it to say that in my limited experience, it Just Works(tm) on regular HD disks without my having to do anything more that run the command. But, as I said, I'm not sure of the state of some of the floppies I've used. Some were surely formatted previously, though not as bootable media. LIkewise some may not have been formatted. > > >reference to formatting the floppy. It does refer to make a "sector > >copy" and writing in a raw format which tells me its bit-for-bit copy > >of a disk including its boot sectors and fs. man dd is suitably > >uninformative. > > No, a sector copy is not a bit-for-bit copy, as sectors do not have > to be arranged sequentially on the track. In fact, sectors used > normally to be written with interleave to speed up access. I haven't > looked into it lately, so I dunno whether sectors are now commonly > written with interleave of 3 as used to be, or are now sequential. yup. I only mean that Im interpreting the statements in the install guide as indicating that the entire disk image, boot record and all is being copied. I might have some truly blank floppies around... I'll play with them and see what happens. A
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