floppy disk inconsistency on reboot

Jeff Vian jvian10 at charter.net
Sun Nov 6 19:20:19 UTC 2005


On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 08:32 -0600, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 04:35:13PM -0800, Sean Bruno wrote:
> > Just a note here about floppy disks that y'all probably know, but caught
> > me off-guard.
> > 
> > If you use the graphical mechanisms (nautilus) for copying files to a
> > floppy disk, the files will not be transferred if you reboot the system
> > from the Desktop->LogOut menu item.  
> > 
> > I think that this could be done logically:
> > 	if (disk is mounted && runlevel == 6)
> > 		sync floppy disk
> > 		unmount floppy
> > 
> > Right now, if you don't "unmount" the floppy, your files will not
> > actually be on the disk.

*nix buffers filesystem reads & writes.  The buffer will be completely
flushed when you do one of 2 things.  1) Umount the file system or 2) do
a 'clean' shutdown.
This is the reason you are told to NEVER remove a floppy until it has
been dismounted.

I am a bit surprised that the write did not occur when you did a clean
reboot after using nautilus to write to the floppy, but then I use a
command line 99+% of the time and thus have never gotten into that
situation.

> > 
> > Sean
> I don't want to me a wise-guy but what you have noticed is the
> difference between linux (or Unix) and Windows. In the latter case
> floppy disks are not mounted. So if in Linux if you are having
> problems with copying files to floppies use the mtools suite.
> Don't mount the floppy but in this case execute: mkcopy file.test a:/
> mdir, mdel, mformat, etc. also exist.
> -- 
> 
> =======================================================================
> It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
> 		-- Rene Descartes
> -------------------------------------------
> Aaron Konstam
> Computer Science
> Trinity University
> telephone: (210)-999-7484
> 




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