Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 21:24:05 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: tienhuat lee <tienhuat_lee@yahoo.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: diskette duplication--exactly Message-ID: <200006080224.VAA59894@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from tienhuat lee <tienhuat_lee@yahoo.com> of "Tue, 06 Jun 2000 23:04:47 PDT." <20000607060447.9953.qmail@web702.mail.yahoo.com>
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tienhuat lee writes: > Dear Sir/Madam: > > How to duplicate "exactly" a diskette, including everything -- > partition tables, bad sectors, file system, file, time stamp, ... BIT > BY BIT? Sounds like tienhuat lee desires to copy copy-protected floppies. If you want to copy a floppy exactly bit by bit then you are looking at the wrong OS for the job. Should probably be in DOS where a disc duplication program can have total access to the floppy drive controller hardware. If you wish to duplicate "normal" floppies, where normal would be defined as the same number of sectors per track and tracks per disc as a typical (normal) MS-DOS 1.44 MB floppy then FreeBSD does a great job. If the floppy is an 800k MacOS formatted, then you are out of luck. I've tried it with oddball floppies out of and HP test instrument with 128 byte sectors and failed, too. But later found a utility from HP that worked under DOS on same PC hardware. Others have suggested reading the floppy with dd, and writing it again with dd. In between you need to format the floppy. And maybe you have only one floppy drive of that type. Use dd to read the original floppy as Alan Clegg suggests: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/me/floppy.img bs=18k But rather than use dd to write, use fdwrite(1): fdwrite -f /home/me/floppy.img -d /dev/fd0 The big advantage is fdwrite will format the floppy on the fly. Heads will make half as many passes over the media when compared to an fdformat(1) followed by dd. The above works just as well for Macintosh 1.44 MB floppies. Needs some adjusting to the floppy device if the media is 720k. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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