[SWLUG] Problems with floppies

[Dominic Pearson]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 11:04:46 +0100
"Davage, Marcus" <Marcus.Davage at LloydsTSB.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi.
> This might be an obvious one, but here goes...
> 
> I'm using Gnome 2 under Mandrake 9.0, and I want to copy lots of
> floppy disks into my home directory. Using the graphical file manager
> I put the disk in, clicked on "floppy" on the desktop, clicked on
> "Home" on the desktop, dragged the icon of the file that I wanted from
> "Floppy" into"Home". Fine. Popped the disk out, pushed the new disk
> in, clicked "Refresh" on "Floppy" and got a "Cannot read from disk"
> alert box. I opened up a terminal, did an "ls" to find the contents of
> the previous disk. I spent 10 minutes mounting and unmounting
> "Floppy", gave up, booted into Windows and copied all my disks in no
> time.
> 
> What was I doing wrong? I just wanted to use Linux to copy floppies.
> Windows can do it.
> 

I'm pretty sure that there's a GUI tool to do this. But, I'm not
familiar with them. The easiest way I know of is to create an image of
the floppy with 'dd'. Open up a terminal, log in as root (su), and type
'dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img'. This'll write an exact copy of the
floppy to the file 'floppy.img'. Note that you won't need to mount the
disk to do this. Then, to write the image to a disk, type 
'dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0'.

This basically does what the Windows system does, except you do it
yourself. There's probably a tool for doing this with GNOME, but I don't
know what it's called.

Kryptops