Aldo Foot writes:
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Sam Varshavchik
<mrsam(a)courier-mta.com> wrote:
<...snip...>
>>
>> Whenever I'm trying the command above I have:
>> floppy --ext2 --format A:
>> floppy 0.16 Copyright 2001-2006, Double Precision, Inc.
>>
>> /dev/fd0H1440: Tiedostoa tai hakemistoa ei ole
>> No formattable capacities for /dev/fd0
>
> You're missing some device node.
>
> Run 'MAKEDEV fd0'
_____
How was he able to get the "Formattable capacities for /dev/fd0:" he showed
in a previous email?
floppy first opens /dev/fd0 and ioctls the device driver to read the
available format capacity. An open of /dev/fd0 succeeds even if the inserted
floppy is unformatted.
But you cannot issue a format on /dev/fd0 in this instance, because the
floppy is unformatted. A format issued on /dev/fd0 only works for floppies
that are already formatted, and uses the same density as the existing
format. Therefore, floppy takes the selected format capacity from /dev/fd0
(the highest supported, by default), then maps it back to its corresponding
/dev/fd0xxxxxx device name, opens that, and then issues the format ioctls.
This is really ancient stuff that I haven't touched in a while. I was even
sufficiently motivated -- seeing that this hasn't been forgotten -- to go in
and add the --ext3 option. When I did that -- and only after rummaging
around the house to find an actual floppy -- I discovered that 1.44mb is too
small for ext3, hahahaha.
I know that he's missing /dev nodes because that's exactly what happened to
me, when I tried to test it. Somehow, at some point in the last six years,
a bunch of /dev/fdnxxxxxx device nodes vanished in Fedora, and it was
necessary to run MAKEDEV manually to bring them back. WTF???
And I don't remember why floppy wound up in the util-linux-ng rpm. It was
never part of util-linux. It's a separate package, which is included in the
Fedora util-linux-ng RPM. The floppy tarball also includes a GTK tool, which
gets stripped out and not even included in util-linux, since it requires
gtk.