Using Floppies on Sparcstations
The sparc floppy drives use high density floppies for a 1.44meg capacity,
or double density floppies at 720k. If the floppy is unformatted, then
before you can do anything with it you need to format it with 'fdformat'.
To format a high density floppy just do:
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fdformat
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to format a double density do:
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fdformat -l
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To initialize a DOS FAT filesystem on the floppy (see the bit below about
'mtools'), add a '-d' argument, like:
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fdformat -d
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You eject a floppy using the command 'eject' (of course). If you can't
get a floppy to eject, mail staff for help (no heroics prying a 60 cent
floppy from a $10,000 workstation, please).
There are a couple of ways to use floppies for file storage. One
possibility is to use the floppy to store a single tar file;
in effect using it as if it were a tape. For instance you could do:
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tar cvf /dev/rfd0 file1 dir1 file2
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To extract the files from the floppy again you could then do:
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tar xvf /dev/rfd0
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or to extract just the file 'dir1/foo', you would do:
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tar xvf /dev/rfd0 dir1/foo
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You can also use the floppy to store a single file by simply copying the
file to the floppy:
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cp file /dev/rfd0
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But I think the easiest way to use the floppy for files is to use the
'mtools' package to access it as a DOS floppy. Before you can write files
to the formatted floppy with mtools you'll have to initialize a DOS FAT
filesystem on the floppy with 'mformat' (unless you formatted the floppy
using the '-d' option to fdformat). After that you can use 'mdir'
to get a directory listing, 'mcd' to change directories, and 'mcopy' to
copy files to and from the floppy. If you are copying text files that
you plan to transport between DOS and Unix, you will probably want to
use the '-t' option to mcopy; this tranlates CR-LF pairs to LF and back,
as appropriate. See the man page for 'mtools' for more details and a
complete list of the mtools commands.
When using mtools you are under the constraints of the DOS filesystem.
For instance, filenames are limited to 8 letter filename plus an optional
1-3 letter suffix, for instance 'telephon.txt'.
Dangers
Mformat on the sparcs will attempt to use blocks marked bad on the FAT table
of DOS floppies. You will probably want to format the disks on a PC and only
use disks that do not have any bad blocks on them. This is probably not a big
deal since floppies are dirt cheap anyways.
Last Modified: June 1999