Bootable Floppy from CD?

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Thu May 25 18:57:55 2000

John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com> wrote:
> The 'dd' approach has a few failings. One, it's not tolerant of
> bad sectors, right?

No, but then not much PC software is. I normally only worry about
making disk images of good disks; I don't have any use for preserving
bad ones. Assuming that it made sense to save an image of a partially
bad diskette, how would you represent bad sectors?

> Two, I think you'd need to be sure that your
> box's settings could handle all the old variations of disk capacity
> from the old days.

As I mentioned, Linux *has* /dev/fd0xx variations for all of the common
PC disk formats. If you want to save an image of something bizarre,
it's definitely the case that you'll have to do something fancier, but
I don't recall anyone asking for that.

> Three, raw disk images aren't easily searchable
> and indexable in the same way as 'tar' or 'zip', but of course those
> formats wouldn't handle the boot sectors.

For dos diskettes, it's just about as easy as tar or zip when either
using mtools, or mounting the image file using the loopback device.
Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 18:57:55 BST