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Date:      Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:25:20 +0100
From:      Ian Dowse <iedowse@maths.tcd.ie>
To:        Fred Clift <fred@clift.org>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: very old bug 
Message-ID:   <200204121225.aa12981@salmon.maths.tcd.ie>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Apr 2002 10:37:35 MDT." <20020411103247.A75142-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net> 

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In message <20020411103247.A75142-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net>, Fred Clift 
writes:
>I keep seeing people referr to mounted filesystems and msdosfs code --
>those are not necessary to produce the problem.
>
>The only time this problem has ever bitten me is when dd-ing floppy images
>to make root/mfs install floppies.

Actually, this only used to happen in the days of FreeBSD 3.x and
earlier when you accidentally specified the block device instead
of the raw device (/dev/fd* instead of /dev/rfd*). Now all devices
in FreeBSD are raw, so dd'ing to a bad or write-protected floppy
returns an error to the user as expected.

Mounting a filesystem is the only way I know of triggering this
bug. That's why for most people, mtools is such a complete workaround,
and its msdos-like semantics are ideal when you just want to pop a
floppy into the drive, copy a few files and then eject the disk.

I'm sure that the bug will be fixed eventually, but probably because
of its effect in the case of the failure of a hot-swappable hard
disk containing a non-critical filesystem, since there isn't a good
workaround like mtools available then.

Ian

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