Floppy drive weird behaviour. Hoary.

[ulrich steffens]

hi,
i always hated the way linux handles floppys and i found that the two
packages 'mtools' and 'mtoolsfm' are rather practical when dealing with
floppies. mtools fm is a two-pane-gui for copying to and from the floppy
WITHOUT mounting the floppy so the data gets written instantly.
mtools adds some commandline tools to your system which lets you copy
and reciecve data in a somewhat dos-style. like:
	mcopy a:/foo.doc /to/wherever/i/need/that/file/

hope this helps
-- 
- ulrich
---------------------------------------------------------------
rule 3: It is OK to put all bad people in a giant meat grinder.


Am Donnerstag, den 07.04.2005, 09:43 +0100 schrieb Jenny Drake:
> For the first time in ages I've needed to write to floppy disks. 
> The same behaviour seems to be happening on any disk I try. 
> Insert disk, it automounts OK and an icon appears to open on the
> desktop.
> Open the icon and I sometimes get a couple of items in it and a free
> space of 396KB. If I try and delete them I get 0 items and a free space
> of 0KB, including if I delete the .Trash folder created on the disk. The
> same thing happens if I try this from a shell. If I do seemingly manage
> to copy another file to the floppy it isn't there the next time I put it
> in the drive. I need to send a small amount of data to a friend with a
> poor internet connection and Windows 2000. I can't find my keyring drive
> (object is too small, house is too messy!) and it seems a waste to burn
> a CD for a couple of MB. 
> 
> This has not been a problem on other distributions.
> 
> Where do I start looking for what is wrong? Any clues? Some of these
> floppies have been used as boot disks in the past, but the problem isn't
> limited to them. Do they need to be reformated as Dos disks? If so how?
> The mkdosfs man page assumes a level of competence I don't have. 
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> 
> Jen
> 
> -- 
> "On a planet of peril she dared to defy its evil rulers."
>