Hi, I could not tell from the documentation which is the proper way to setup and use floppy disks on the i386 architecture, i.e. which is the right partition to use. I am talking about the standard 3.5 inch 1.44 MB floppy disks. There are several possibilities to put a file system onto one:
First of all, a floppy needs to be low level formatted, which can be achieved by the fdformat program. (Ususally, this is not necessary nowadays, since floppies come preformatted.) Then fdisk shows an empty partition table. Without adding a type a6 partition, I have a valid disklabel: > 16 partitions: > # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg] > c: 2880 0 unused 0 0 # Cyl 0 - 79 I can then do a "newfs fd0c" and afterwards the disklabel looks as follows: > 16 partitions: > # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg] > c: 2880 0 4.2BSD 2048 16384 80 # Cyl 0 - 79 And I can mount /dev/fd0c. But _strangely_, I can mount /dev/fd0a as well! (But I can't do "newfs fd0a" ...) The other way would be to add a proper partition to the disklabel: Either by doing "disklabel -w fd0 floppy3" or by interactively adding a partition "a" that covers the whole disk. The first command yields a disklabel like this: > 16 partitions: > # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg] > a: 2880 0 4.2BSD 512 4096 80 # Cyl 0 - 79 > b: 2880 0 unused 0 0 # Cyl 0 - 79 > c: 2880 0 unused 0 0 # Cyl 0 - 79 The second command's disklabel does not have the "b" partition. Then, doing "newfs fd0a" or "newfs fd0c" yields a filesystem I can mount as /dev/fd0a or /dev/fd0c in either case. The command "newfs fd0c" changes the disklabel to the following form though: > 16 partitions: > # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg] > a: 2880 0 4.2BSD 512 4096 80 # Cyl 0 - 79 > b: 2880 0 unused 0 0 # Cyl 0 - 79 > c: 2880 0 unused 2048 16384 80 # Cyl 0 - 79 which should actually be invalid since "a" and "c" overlap. Anyway, it works and both partitions can be used. Well, I am a little confused and would like to know which is the proper way of handling this. I think that the proper way is to add an use partition "a", but I have seen usage of partition "c" in several documentations on the web, so this is why I ask. Thanks in advance! Michael
