"Manuel A. Camacho Q." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I know this must be a simple one, but got no idea. How can I copy floppy
> disks on a single disk drive unit? (from the shell prompt)
There are many ways of doing this, and some of them are
probably easier than what I'm going to tell you here, but
this is the way that I do it:
mount /mnt/floppy
mkdir /tmp/floppystuff
cp /mnt/floppy/* /tmp/floppystuff
cp /tmp/floppystuff /mnt/floppy/*
rm /tmp/floppystuff/*
You might need to be root to do that mount command (i.e. do
a "su" first, and give it the root password).
In fact, the form of the mount command I've specified here
depends on what's in your /etc/fstab file. Mine has a line
like the following (which I suspect is pretty ordinary for
a RedHat box):
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy vfat owner,noauto 0 0
So if I say "mount /mnt/floppy" that tells the system to
connect the device /dev/fd0 (which is usually your floppy
drive) to the filesystem, putting it in the standard
location /mnt/floppy. (And I believe you'll get an error if
that location doesn't exist already.)
By the way, once you've mounted the floppy, it should stay
mounted until you unmount it ("umount /mnt/floppy", yes
that's "umount", with only one "n").
Caveat: This method copies all of the files, but I can swear
to it that this will really produce a bit-for-bit copy of
the floppy (for example, I've never tried to make a copy of
an MS-DOS boot disk this way). Maybe there's an obscure
trick using 'dd' instead of 'cp' that would work better for
some purposes.
This is the traditional unixy approach to doing these
things... And if you want to read too much about it,
you can check things like "man fstab" or "info fstab",
"man cp" or "info cp", "man dd" or "info dd", and so on.
If you want to read about newer spiffier and probably
better ways of doing these things, try this:
info fileutils
Note there doesn't seem to be a "man fileutils". If you've
never used info before, you might want to try an "info info"
first.
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