Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX

disk full up!!! why???

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voidmain:
Well, you wouldn't want to copy to /dev/fd0 as that is the raw device. You would first want to mount the floppy ("mount /mnt/floppy" for instance), then copy files to the floppy:

$ cp somefile.txt /mnt/floppy

Depending on your mount options in /etc/fstab as to whether your normal user account has permissions to write to the floppy. But if it works there, it should work in XFce. Of course I do all file operations from a shell so...

Sleeping Dog:
Just a Diagnostic Suggestion

On your dual boot system, try loading DrDOS and a DOS utility called LREAD (if you have a little compatable space.)  Using LREAD under DrDOS you can view, modify, copy, etc. UNIX and LINUX files.  Try copying the file(s) in question to the floppy.  This will give you a good indication whether your issue is hardware or formatting related.  It might help you to at least eliminate one or more of the possibilities.

Just a thought.  Hope that it helps.

Sleeping Dog

Centurian:
Hey Calum,

To me this sounds simular to a problem I had a while back. I also removed a floppie without unmounting it (I was in a hurry and just didn't think about it) and the entire system froze up. Nothing worked at all. I had to hard boot the system. After that the system became slower and slower as time passed. It was like the system was becoming more and more loaded down as time went on. After 5 days and dozens of reboots this still continued so I decided that something serious was wrong. (Kernel damage maybe not sure) I reformatted the linux disks and reinstalled Mandrake 8.1. After that it started working perfectly again. To say the least I have never again forgotten to unmount a drive.    I use usermount now all the time.

Centurian:
Been sitting here thinking about this since I posted and maybe I can explain why the problem exists.

In dos everytime you access the floppie it mounts it, does what you ask of it, then unmounts the floppie. For CD's when the CD is put in the drive it mounts and when it come out it unmounts.

Linux expects you to tell it when you mount/unmount a floppie or CD. It makes no checks but simply assumes you know what you are doing. That could potentially cause alot of problems. Consider this now you remove a floppie without unmounting it then the computer continues to think it is mounted. I don't know if linux unmounts floppies at shutdown or not but somehow I doubt it does. That would have the potential to cause an endless loop within linux which would consistently slow down the computer and would cause freezes and other crashes as it slowly eats up memory. The thing there is that although after reboot the system sees the floppie as unmounted but I am guessing it also sees another non-existant floppie that is still mounted and continually attempts to access that floppie.

If that is correct it could cause an infinite amount of problems over time. In the almost 1 year that I have been using linux that is the only serious flaw I have seen in it. I know it caused me to re-install.

mobrien_12:
You might want to start using mtools for your simple floppy disk i/o.

mdir
mdel
mcopy
mformat

etc etc man mtools

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