Why can't I access my floppy disk?

[Anthony Atkielski]

Loren M. Lang writes:

> If you were using one of the pre-fabbed floppy images provided by
> freebsd like kern.flp then you would want to write it raw to disk, not
> mount it, and this is forbidden at securelevel 3.

I was trying to do it with dd.  I tried the same on my other system (the
one on which I'm trying to install FreeBSD for experimentation), and it
worked, but that system is at the default level of securelevel=-1.

That's fine, though, since it gives me a machine that can do the job,
which is all I need.  I trust a UNIX command a bit more than I trust a
Windows command (especially since the one supplied on the FreeBSD CD is
a bit weird).

> I don't know why this is, it should still be possible, especially since
> you can mount cdroms.  /dev/fd0 is read/write by root right?  And the
> disk already had a formatted filesystem on it before you tried mounting
> it?

Yes to both questions.  But it must be securelevel, because it works on
the test machine.  The man page doesn't say anything about this
restriction, though, nor is it obvious from what the page does say.

-- 
Anthony