[techtalk] sparc & disk formatting...

[Fan, Laurel]

Weilbacher, Katie, CON, OASD(HA)/TMA, said:
> he's running RH 5.2 on a sun sparc 10, with a floppy drive. the plan is to
> download mysql & burn on a cd here at work (with the fast connection).
then
> at home (on NT 4.0), he wants to create an archive of mysql that spans
> multiple floppy disks. so we're looking for a util that will allow the
> creation of a spanned diskette archive in a format that the sparc will
> understand. 

Linux (I assume the sparc's running Linux, not Solaris) can understand msdos
formatted floppies. (can either mount them or use mtools).

If I was trying to use floppies to transfer stuff between 2 Linuxes, I'd
use split on one end to split the tar.gz into 1.4M parts, copy each to a
floppy, and then cat them together on the other.  I'm not sure if there's
anything on Windows that can split files. (If there is it probably would
be from warez doods, not say, Microsoft, since it would make it easier
to copy or download files, which we all know is evil.)

I don't think Unix unzip can handle multipart zip archives, but if it can,
then you could do that.

> so the question is - does anyone know of an app that will do this? my
> initial thought, of course, was rawrite. but i don't know how 
> that works
> with sparc architecture. 

rawrite probably wouldn't work, since you'd have to have floppy images
first.  The problem isn't the format of the floppies, since Linux (it's
an OS thing, not an architecture thing) can read dos floppies, it's how
to get Windows to split the files.