FBSD 8.2 and USB Floppies

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:57:02 +0100, Pegasus Mc Cleaft wrote:
> On Monday 18 July 2011 19:45:27 James Colannino wrote:
> > 
> > newfs /dev/da0
> > 
> > It was successful.  I then tried to mount the new filesystem (mount
> > /dev/da0 /mnt), and got the same error: invalid argument.  Does FBSD
> > have a problem mounting USB floppy disks?  It's not a big deal, as my
> > other USB storage devices seem to work, and as I have an ordinary floppy
> > drive I can try, but that curious part of me wants to know why this
> > isn't working.
> > 
> 
>  Have you tried: 
> 
> 	mount_msdosfs /dev/da0 /mnt


You can alternatively use the "most portable file system"
which isn't even a file system: it is tar.

I've been using this approach among different UNIX, Linux
and Solaris systems that didn't have network connections.
The approach on FreeBSD is this:

	# fdformat -y /dev/da0
	# tar cvf /dev/da0 files...

and on the target system:

	# tar xvf /dev/da0

Add compression (z and j) if required.

In this example, da0 represents the USB floppy drive; a
regular one would be /dev/fd0. (Device names vary among
UNIX and Linux systems.)

Although this approach doesn't allow you to mount MS-DOS
formatted floppies, it's a good check to see if writing
and reading of the media works as intended.

For the mount_msdos command mentioned above, check if you
need additional masking flags as this file system doesn't
understand UNIX permissions (and therefore files are often
+x).



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...