Re: using FAT floppies- a drawback
John Hassled,
> Yes. Just like tape. Note, however, that one bad sector will make the tar
> unreadable. If you are going to do this you should test the floppies and
> not use any that aren't perfect. The simplest way to test floppies is to
> format them.
> Tarring directly to the device gets you maximum data density, but at a
> price.
Also, there are the 1880k and 1992k formats. Hmm, at least there used
to be; I don't see devices for these now that i'm using 2.2.
Anyway, superformat supports these formats; see the man page.
Depending upon your drive or quality of disks, these may or may not be
useful. The cheap drive in my desktop writes well but reads poorly on
1992, and only about 1 in 3 1882's for tom's unix come out usable on
it. But my thinkpad loves the formats, and can read many that the
desktop can't, even though the desktop wrrote them.
I don't know how you do a raw tar to these; maybe a MAKEDEV?
rick
p.s. To use them as diskettes, after you superformat, you need to
mke2fs them. also, as near as i can tell, you can't use FAT on them,
either; it complains that it doesn't have a second something-or-other
that it needs. But why bother; the dark side wouldn't read them anyway.
p.p.s. Only use these for very temporary storage & transfer, they seem
highly unstable. They're great for transferring lots of stuff to an
old laptop without a network connection, but i wouldn't trust data to
them. For that matter, don't trust data to 1.4M floppies, either . . .
--
Reply to: