Floppy Disks
| Summary |
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| This article discusses methods of using floppy disks on Arch Linux. |
Altough rarely used nowadays, one still might need/want to use a floppy disk (for example, I practice guitar to backing tracks played from my Yamaha keyboard, which has only a floppy disk drive interface). Common tasks with floppies are described bellow, with available tools to accomplish them.
Contents |
Installation
Kernel module
Most of the floppy drives should be supported by stock kernel (mine always were). External USB drives might be an exception - I haven't tested that yet. Module floppy is used as a driver for floppy drives.
As you can see, it comes with the stock Arch kernel.
Module floppy is not loaded automatically by default for me. I load it manually each time I use floppy disk"
$ modprobe floppy
Packages
There are two packages in the Arch package repository I know of - dosfstools and mtools. Respective commands belong to these packages (grepped output of pacman -Ql dosfstools mtools):
dosfstools /sbin/dosfsck dosfstools /sbin/dosfslabel dosfstools /sbin/fsck.msdos dosfstools /sbin/fsck.vfat dosfstools /sbin/mkdosfs dosfstools /sbin/mkfs.msdos dosfstools /sbin/mkfs.vfat mtools /usr/bin/amuFormat.sh mtools /usr/bin/floppyd mtools /usr/bin/floppyd_installtest mtools /usr/bin/lz mtools /usr/bin/mattrib mtools /usr/bin/mbadblocks mtools /usr/bin/mcat mtools /usr/bin/mcd mtools /usr/bin/mcheck mtools /usr/bin/mclasserase mtools /usr/bin/mcomp mtools /usr/bin/mcopy mtools /usr/bin/mdel mtools /usr/bin/mdeltree mtools /usr/bin/mdir mtools /usr/bin/mdu mtools /usr/bin/mformat mtools /usr/bin/minfo mtools /usr/bin/mkmanifest mtools /usr/bin/mlabel mtools /usr/bin/mmd mtools /usr/bin/mmount mtools /usr/bin/mmove mtools /usr/bin/mpartition mtools /usr/bin/mrd mtools /usr/bin/mren mtools /usr/bin/mshowfat mtools /usr/bin/mtools mtools /usr/bin/mtoolstest mtools /usr/bin/mtype mtools /usr/bin/mxtar mtools /usr/bin/mzip mtools /usr/bin/tgz mtools /usr/bin/uz
Common tasks
Here are the commands needed to perform the most common tasks. In all examples, I suppose /dev/fd0 to be the linux device for the floppy drive. By default, all these tasks need to be performed as root (unless you use Sudo or something similar).
Format
$ mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0
Mount
$ mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /media/floppy
Troubleshooting
Things like this can happen:
$ mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0 mkfs.msdos 3.0.5 (27 Jul 2009) mkfs.msdos: unable to get diskette geometry for '/dev/fd0'
Which means: "Get a new floppy." Sorry (happened to my only disk available when writing this..).
More Resources
- http://www.daniel-baumann.ch/software/dosfstools/ - DOS filesystem utilities (not so verbosely documented IMHO)
- http://www.gnu.org/software/mtools/ - a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from Unix without mounting them
Todo
- floppy(8)
- fdformat(8)
- recovering a "dead" floppy