Why not to, was Re: how to format a floppy in ext2

[David Wright <d.wright@open.ac.uk>]

Quoting Robert Voigt (f1k@gmx.de):
> I find the truncation of long filenames on MSDOS floppies really 
> annoying. But I haven't found a way to format a floppy in ext2. Fdformat 
> is obsolete, and superformat seems to be unable to format ext2. Is there 
> something that can do it?

While this thread has probably given you all the information you need
for formatting floppies as ext2, I would recommend that you don't.
As someone pointed out, vfat will give you long filenames (but not
filenames that only differ in case; you didn't want that?).

Remember that floppies don't lock themselves in like many removable
media: the first time you eject a mounted floppy, you'll be left
with the problem of unmounting it cleanly. Once a DOS floppy has
finished writing, it doesn't matter if you forget all about it and
eject it some days later - you can umount it after the event.

Apart from that, I don't trust floppies enough myself just to copy
files onto them; I prefer to use only zip files, which look after
unix filenames, permissions etc., and give you some confidence that
files you copy out of them are error-free.

Finally, you can always get hold of a file if you're unfortunate
enough to be near only non-linux machines by leaving a copy of
unzip.exe on each floppy.

Cheers,

-- 
Email:  d.wright@open.ac.uk   Tel: +44 1908 653 739  Fax: +44 1908 655 151
Snail:  David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA
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