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Florida State University Computer Science Department

Using SUN floppy drives.

MS-DOS compatible floppies

mdir, mcopy, etc. (see below)

Unix style floppies

fdformat [-l]
newfs -v /dev/rfd0a ...
fdmount mountdirectory
fdumount
eject

DESCRIPTION of MS-DOS compatible floppy handling

A set of utilites collectively known as "mtools" can be used to access high (1.4mb) and low (720k) MS-DOS floppy disks on SparcStations. The most common commands are:

[mdir] - get a directory listing from a floppy.
[mcopy] - copy from/to a floppy disk.
[eject] - ejects the disk.

Several other commands exist to provide other MS-DOS style functions. See "man mtools", "man mcopy", and "man mdir" for details. Please note that SunOS is very picky about formatting floppies (it insists upon perfect media), so it is advisable to do this on a PC.

DESCRIPTION Of SunOS floppy handling

SunOS provides a set of utilites that allow one to create an entire (very small) Unix filesystem on a floppy disk. They must be treated like any other filesystem in that they must be mounted to a directory tree, and unmounted before removal. These disks will NOT be MS-DOS compatible.

[fdformat]
This is used to format the new floppy drive. To format a low density floppy (720K), the -l option is used. This is usually used with a new floppy disk.

[newfs -v /dev/rfd0a]
This is used to create the file system on a floppy. This creates a new file system on the floppy disk. It also deletes all old information on the disk.

[fdmount]
This can be used to mount a file system. fdmount mountdirectory mounts the floppy disk on the drive speci- fied. If the user types fdmount /mnt, the floppy is mounted on /mnt. The user can now write to /mnt.

[fdumount]
This is used to unmount a file system. This must be done before the floppy is taken out of the drive using eject (see below).

[eject]
ejects the floppy from the disk drive.

SEE ALSO

man mtools, mdir, mcopy, floppy, newfs, mount, umount


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