best floppy disk copier

[1ofmany]

Can someone tell me the best way to copy floppy disk to floppy disk (using one drive) while in Linux. I'm using Mandrake 7.2 and have a lot of floppy disk that I did to make copies of.

[ph34r]

There are a lot of ways, but you would maybe want to do something like:


su < Become root >
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/tmpfile
<change floppies with a blank one>
dd if=/tmp/tmpfile of=/dev/fd0


This will make a exact copy of the floppy, including whatever filesystem was on it, a boot record (if it had one), etc.


Also, you could make floppy images out of them all like:


dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~/flopppyimages/myfloppy.img


and then burn all the images to a cd, along with a copy of rawrite (get it off a distro cd). That way, you can always make a new copy of any of your floppies.


edit -now that I have thought of it, I am gonna do that for a bunch of the *important* floppies I have at work, and when I am done, make the cd bootable, with either a dos install or a minimal linux install....

[ 08 February 2001: Message edited by: ph34r ]

[diskman]

If they are standard 1.44 floppies and NOT the 1.7 or 2mb formatted then you can use the following commands:

To make an "image" of the floppy for later retrieval use this:

cat /dev/fd0 > diskname.img
OR
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=diskname.img

To recreate your disk use this:

cat diskname.img > /dev/fd0
OR
dd if=diskname.img of=/dev/fd0

This works for tapes too. I made backups of all my disks and SCSI 150 tapes at work a long time ago. Worked for SCO 3.2.x install disks and tapes. The SCO unix install tapes were a bit funky to backup but I got it. We currently have an archive of about 200 system and program disks on our server and on CD-ROM. Linux's RAWRITE.EXE can also re-create these 1.44 images in DOS for ya too. This DOES NOT work on 1.7 or 2.0 mb floppies as I havent messed with it too mych on those formats.

Later

[ph34r]

Works great with the super-formatted floppies (1.72mb). Sadly, I let my 2.88mb floppy from my old IBM 8088 go in a trade... Of course, ya can't get the 2.88 disks anymore either...

[1ofmany]

Thanks guys that worked great!!