Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!sun-barr!sun!sally!plocher
From: plocher%sally@Sun.COM (John Plocher)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport
Subject: Re: Backups of Distibution Floppies
Message-ID: <105986@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 21 May 89 05:22:10 GMT
References: <752@mccc.UUCP> <241@vector.Dallas.TX.US>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: plocher@sun.UUCP (John Plocher)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 16

In <241@vector.Dallas.TX.US> Chip Rosenthal writes:
>If you've got a utility which just copies the raw data on the disk, then
>it matters not what the logical format is, just that the physical format
>be understood.  Under DOS you've got DISKCOPY.  Under unix, there's dd.

Under DOS 3.3 (and 4.0?) the DISKCOPY program seems to only copy DOS
formatted disks.  If the boot record isn't a DOS generated one, the
copy will not be correct.  The Microport distribution boot disks had to
be specially engineered to work around this problem.

I didn't do the engineering so I don't really know the specifics of the
problem, but disks copied with 3.2 diskcopy worked and with 3.3 diskcopy
they didn't.  Then we fiddled with the boot sector and they would copy
fine.

   -John Plocher