From owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG  Fri Sep 12 14:05:16 2003
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From: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com>
To: Chris <bsdnewbie@coolarrow.com>, freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org
Organization: Siemens Medical Systems
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 14:04:08 -0700
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Subject: Re: formatting floppy
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On Friday 12 September 2003 01:38 pm, Chris wrote:

> What's the difference between fd0 and rfd0 ?

The first is a "block" device, the second is a "character" or "raw" 
device. Traditionally, UNIX systems have had both block and character 
devices for everything. But FreeBSD-5.x has made everything a block 
device, so that rfd0 no longer exists. "The Complete FreeBSD", latest 
edition, talks some more on this.

It used to be that your needed to use character devices for anything 
that was unformatted or "raw". For example, you could only create a 
filesystem on a character device, but could only mount a block device 
filesystem. Thus formatting a floppy would require /dev/rfd0, and a lot 
of documentation still has this. But formatting /dev/fd0 in FreeBSD-5.x 
works.

David