Floppy disks
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