Floppy Copy?

[John & Sheila Nickerson]

On Sunday 15 April 2001 01:04 pm, you wrote:
> > dd if=SuSEbootdisk.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
>
> ...
>
> > I'm also assuming that the second part of the command
> > (of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k) is specifing that is is a 1440 KB diskette.  But
> > with the "dd" command how or where do you do the diskette switch?
> > By the way the diskette copies I made with the "cp" command came out
> > perfectly.
>
> dd is useful if you only wanna copy part of the disk.  For instance if you
> just want to get the boot record.  dd lets you specify how much of the disk
> to copy, whereas with cp it copies it until it gets to the end.  in the
> above example 'if' is the input file (~/SuSEbootdisk.img), of is the output
> file (/dev/fd0, the floppy drive) and bs is how much to copy (1440k, or in
> other words all of it)
>
> --Ray

Just to keep the confusion level down a little.  To copy just the boot block 
you would issue dd if=/dev/fd0 of=some file_or_device bs=512 count=1
where the bs= denotes the block size of a single read or write ie. read 512 
bytes from /dev/fd0 (the boot block) and write count=1 blocks of 512 bytes to 
some file or device specified in of=

John
-- 
Nickerson, Kailua, Hawaii

http://www.pixi.com/~johnnick/homepage.html