[Gllug] Raw Partitions

[Richard Cohen]

On 17/11/05, Martin A. Brooks <martin at hinterlands.org> wrote:
> Christian Smith wrote:
> > What ioctls would be needed?
>
>
> Well, for one, unless I'm _really_ out of touch.  You can't write to a
> loop device.  File systems so mounted are read-only.  No?
>
> Mart.

I suspect you've only ever used loopback to mount CD/DVD images...
using iso9660... which is, of course, an inherently read-only
filesystem.

As Ben says, it's perfectly capable of handling read/write filesystems
- one of the more interesting and useful things you can do with it is,
when you really need to, download a DOS boot floppy image, mount the
image, copy some downloaded files (i.e. BIOS upgrade) to it, then dd
it to a phsyical disk.

This of course assumes you have a floppy drive.  I don't.  I therefore
seem to be unable to upgrade my BIOS...

Cheers
Richard
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