Floppy Drive

[Jim Logan]

In article <1991May30.005614.2095 at wintermute.north.de>
kaba at wintermute.north.de (Kai Bartels) writes:
# avalon at coombs.anu.edu.au (Darren Reed) writes:
# >I'm interested in getting the 3.5 drive to work, but there is little
# >documentation on how i should prepare a disk to use and which device
# >it is.  From one of the manual entries (fmtflpy i think it was) it
# >mentioned /dev/dsk/c6d0s0 or some such name.  i coudlnt find that
# >command either curiously.  The fstab doesnt mention it (it wouldnt be
# >a bad idea to put it in commented out).
# I couln't find the fmtflop either (and I'm sure there isn't any) but I'm
# formatting the discs on my old A2000 with AmigaDos. mkfs or tar didn't
# complain! (btw: the device to use seems to be /dev/(r)dsk/fd0.)
# 
# My question to this is: how to read/write/format a 3.5" disc in ibm-format
# 720k ?

You need to use the /usr/amiga/bin/fmtfd (I'm not on my system to
check, but I think the name's right) and redirect it into
/dev/rdsk/fd0f or /dev/dsk/fd0f (I forget which, but it's
probably the "rdsk" one.)  The command is just a script that
writes 16k blocks of zeroes.

Neat way of doing it, but it has no man pages.  (Neither
/dev/rdsk/fd0f nor fmtfd have man pages!)  Haven't tried yet, but
you can probably cpio or tar directly to that device to format
while backing up.

			-Jim
-- 
Jim Logan                Home: uunet!gimlet!logan
Consultant               Work: logan at netx.com
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