How to create my own floppy images?

[chris_i386]

In Windows I use RawWriteWin to create floppy images from floppies I have, like Linux boot disks, Win 3.11 install disks etc.
Now I want to do the same thing in Linux.
As far as I got it I can use dd for it, but neither man nor info nor Google offered any useful help to me.
Can someone please tell me what exacly I am searching for? And if you remember the commands for creating images from 1.4MB / 720 K floppies from the top of your head, please let me know!

Thanks in advance,
Chris.

[irlandes]

Conventional wisdom in the linux community is that one uses dd to make images on a HD of a floppy.

This is a subset of "Real men write their own drivers."

try:

cat /dev/fd0 > /path/morepath/filename.img

Assuming, that is, your floppy is in fd0. Hope I typed it right, because I am typing it by memory, which one can do for cat. Real men who write their own drivers can remember the dd stuff, but the rest of us have to write it down and look it up.

I am told you should do this without the floppy mounted, though I have no idea what happens with supermount.

You can make an image of a cdrom by substituting the /dev/?? for your cdrom instead of /dev/fd0, but I have no idea how one burns a cd of a cd image, since I do not have a burner at this time.

To make a floppy of the image:

cat /path/morepath/filename.img > /dev/fd0

This gets really weird. With Redhat 7.3 (perhaps for all distros but I have not personally checked) it will act like it made the floppy, but won't do it until you mount or umount the floppy, then it grinds away.

[dungscooperdave]

That's a little odd. It's cool though that it's so easy to make an image in Linux. In windows you have to have some sort of special program to do it for you...

[irlandes]

Originally posted by dungscooperdave
That's a little odd. It's cool though that it's so easy to make an image in Linux. In windows you have to have some sort of special program to do it for you...

Linux also requires a special program to do the job. cat IS a special program. However, linux includes it at no extra charge. :-) That's the difference between MS and linux in my opinion.

So you don't misunderstand me, a lot of the 2,000+ commands in linux are actually "special programs" that someone wrote, and they have been included in the elementary linux collections or whatever you call the linux distros.

My favorite is the really unknown dc which is a virtually unlimited digit, reverse polish calculator. You want a square root to 1,000 digits, just tell it 1000 k <enter> and that sets resolution to 1,000 digits.

It's a bit tricky to learn, but you can get the details via man dc

Some guy wanted such a calculator so he wrote the program, and it is included in the bc package on almost all current distros. It does a lot more than I know how to do. I use it to add my expense journal, since the numbers you entered are saved in the terminal so you can go back and double-check it.

A lot of, if not all, the commands are that way. Someone wanted that function, so he/she wrote it and it became part of linux.

If you are a programmer, and can think of a really useful function, you can add a command to linux.

[dungscooperdave]

Here's one. How about a program that let's you convert between units from the console. Just type "convert [float] [unit1] [unit2]", where float is any real number whose value you want to convert to another unit, unit1 is the unit that corresponds to float, and unit2 is the number that you want to convert to. For example:
convert 3.14 gigabytes megabytes
This would generate the following output:
3.14 gigabytes=
3215.36 megabytes
Voila, a good idea for a new program.:D Now if only I had the time to learn how to make this...

[irlandes]

but check before you start and make sure it's not already in there. The bc package which includes dc has some other goodies. If you have kpackage in your distro, look up bc and see if it mentions anything. Try man bc of course...

[chris_i386]

Thanks for the replies, I actually knew how to write images to a floppy using cat, but I never thought of doing it the other way round!
I tried it with RedHat 8 and it works without a hassle.
Just make sure the floppy has the right format for the image, because cat apparently doesn't reformat the floppy. ( --> 1.4m floppies for 1.4m images, 720k floppies for 720k images)
BTW: bc is nice, thanks for the tip.
Do you know any other goodies you'd like to share?
My favourite program right now is scp (secure copy) I use it to copy files to and from my university home directory without logging in to any ftp/ssh/whatever session, basically like this
scp myfile user@foo.org:~/directory