From owner-freebsd-stable Fri Apr 12 4:25:27 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id E6D6337B416 for ; Fri, 12 Apr 2002 04:25:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from walton.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 12 Apr 2002 12:25:20 +0100 (BST) To: Fred Clift Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: very old bug In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 11 Apr 2002 10:37:35 MDT." <20020411103247.A75142-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net> Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:25:20 +0100 From: Ian Dowse Message-ID: <200204121225.aa12981@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message