Date   : Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:30:33 +0100
From   : bbcmailinglist@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Writing BBC Disc Images on Linux

I think I'm getting somewhere.  I don't know what the mknod does or did
but it seems to have worked.  There is already a device called /dev/fd0u720
so I made a new one with:

 sudo mknod -m 0660 /dev/fd0d720 b 2 24

I can now use /dev/fd0d720 to correctly format and mount and read & write
720K DOS discs.

The next step is to get it to write BBC ADFS & DFS discs.  I've been trying
out setfdprm but I don't really know what parameters I can use, and the
manual page says "This documentation is grossly incomplete"!!

Best wishes,



Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Jules Richardson [mailto:jules.richardson99@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:05:22 -0500
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] Writing BBC Disc Images on Linux

Andrew Benham wrote:
> I was going to reply to the previous message saying that I hadn't seen
> the /dev/fd0* device files for years, but then I looked on the CentOS 5.3
> box I'm using at work and:

Aha!

OK, so e.g.:

   mknod -m 0660 /dev/fd0u720 b 2 16

... will create a 720k device file*, probably needing a chown/chgrp after to 
set up the ownership. I can't quite recall how the device mapping goes, now - 
I think the one with device minor of 24 is probably "DD disk in a HD drive" 
(i.e. 720KB in PC terms), whilst device minor 16 as above is "DD disk in a DD 
drive".

* I have no idea if the logic to support all this is still in the kernel, 
though - although chances are good that it is, and they just dropped automatic 
creation of the less-common floppy device files in the common Linux distros as 
the number of files in /dev was getting pretty huge.

cheers

Jules

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