[Techtalk] floppy disks @#$!!

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Friday 21 November 2003 11:20, wendy wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 18:40, Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
> > Just to state the obvious, but you do always unmount the floppy before
> > ejecting it?  Otherwise the data may never get written to the disk.
> >
> > Also, 'sync' is the command to force the flushing of the filesytem
> > buffers. This will force the data to the disk even without unmounting.
>
> What exactly is supermount in fstab. If the floppy is configured with
> supermount, does it still need to be unmounted. Does the same go for
> cdroms?  Here is my supermount entry for floppy:
>
> none /mnt/floppy supermount
> dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0
> 0
>
> as opposed to the old:
> /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto
> user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,noauto,exec 0 0
>
> I copied this off the supermount off my husband's machine so that I
> wouldn't have to be root to mount the floppy. I couldn't get into it
> easily and it all seems to be automatic but I have been good about
> unmounting it since I put the supermount entry in and after your post,
> I'm wondering if I'm playing with fire.

I've never used supermount.  According to google, it is similar to automount, 
which I also try to avoid - however, that is just my personal preferance.

In theory, the use of supermount and sync should mean that you do not need to 
unmount the disk.  However, if you save a file and then immediately remove 
the disk (before the automatic sync takes place) you *will* loose data.

I would recommend running the 'sync' command before ejecting the disk.  It 
should then be safe to remove it, and supermount will (in theory) take care 
of the actual unmounting process.

Or use mtools as as Mike suggested.  In this case, always save your files to 
the hard-drive and then copy to the floppy with Mtools.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +10 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net