Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!munnari!moncskermit!goanna!yabbie!rcodi
From: rcodi@yabbie.oz (Ian Donaldson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Up on Compaq portable (with fixes & tools)
Message-ID: <450@yabbie.oz>
Date: Thu, 30-Apr-87 22:41:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: yabbie.450
Posted: Thu Apr 30 22:41:00 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 2-May-87 14:37:13 EDT
References: <1416@drivax.UUCP>
Organization: RMIT Comm & Elec Eng, Melbourne, Australia.
Lines: 35
Keywords: disk DOS tools utilities

In article <1416@drivax.UUCP>, cavender@drivax.UUCP (Steve Cavender) writes:
> FREAD and FWRITE are included here as as source.  They were written
> for MSC 4.0.  FREAD copies the entire floppy image (360Kb) to a file on the hard
> disk; FWRITE puts the image back out to a floppy.  They are very simple-minded,
> but they're all I needed to get my backup copies made, and they run
> surprisingly fast.  

<code supplied here>

A question: why do you need a special program to do this?

Surely the "cp" or "dd" commands can do this by something like:

	cp /dev/rflp file
    or:
	dd if=/dev/rflp of=file

    "rflp" might be the name of the RAW floppy device (I don't know
    exactly what its called on MINIX since I don't have the source yet)
 
If MINIX is reasonably V7 compatable, both these commands should
be equivalent to the FREAD program supplied.  Similarly for FWRITE.
And they -don't- depend on any hardware or interrupt vectors like the 
given programs.

If you want it to go faster you can put a "bs=64k" on the "dd" command,
if 64k dma is possible (or simulated).  You should be able to achieve
the same sort of speed that the given programs would have achieved this way.

If the kernel doesn't support the raw floppy device, then 
code should be added to the kernel.  I just dislike programs that
go straight to the hardware if there is a portable way to do it
and utilities already exist.

Ian D