[SWLUG] Problems with floppies

[Justin Mitchell]

On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 11:04, Davage, Marcus wrote:

> What was I doing wrong? I just wanted to use Linux to copy floppies.
> Windows can do it.

Sounds like an issue with an automounter type program.

A far more useful thing you can do with floppies is to make an image of
the entire floppy (boot partitions and all) which you can then use to
make more copies of the floppy later.

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=myfloppy.img

will copy the image of the floppy into the file myfloppy.img which you
can then gzip and store for later. 

to put the floppy image back onto a new (pre-formated, but not
necessarily empty) disk is

ff if=myfloppy.img of=/dev/fd0

This has been a godsend many times in the past for things like driver
disks and dos boot disks etc, you keep copies of the floppy image on
your harddisk and it then doesnt matter if you lose or break the
original.