LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 21:13:58 +0930

Re: Toshiba slimline laptop CD-reader choice

On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 08:50:47PM +0930, Daryl Tester wrote:
> Alan Kennington wrote:
> 
> > I've done a "dd" on the floppy disk, but I have no idea which
> > bytes I should look at to determine the file system type.
> 
> "file - < /dev/fd0" usually gives a clue.
> 

[The gist of what's below is a request for info on
how to convert a mounted minix file system into
a file which contains that file system.]

Well, finally, by swapping the disk between different
machines (and discovering that one of the machines
seems to have a dud floppy dirve now!), I worked out
that the disk was in VFAT format.

(In the meantime, the process that was trying to mount
the disk as a file system went into "uninterruptible sleep"
mode, necessitating a re-boot to get back access to the
drive. But then the "shutdown" ended up getting hung on
trying to kill that process, and itself became 
uninterruptible. So I turned the machine off and on.
And this resulted in about 40 minutes of fsck check
on the 500 GB or so of file system. Something tells me
that testing the file system type of a floppy disk should
not lead to 40 minutes of fsck checking. But maybe life
is just like that. Anyway...)

Then when I looked into the VFAT file system, it turned out
that there were 3 gzipped minix file systems!!
Someone must have had a good laugh designing this
floppy disk!

So I looked in on minix file system file:

--------------------------------------------------
emu soft/suse# file net-mod
net-mod: Minix filesystem, 30 char names

emu soft/suse# mount ./net-mod ./net -t minix -o loop

emu soft/suse# ls net
.              de4x5.o        es3210.o       ni5010.o       sk98lin.o
..             de600.o        eth16i.o       ni52.o         sktr.o
82596.o        de620.o        ewrk3.o        ni65.o         smc-ultra.o
8390.o         depca.o        hp-plus.o      old_tulip.o    smc-ultra32.o
NEEDMOD        dgrs.o         hp.o           olympic.o      smc9194.o
NET            dmfe.o         hp100.o        pcnet32.o      tlan.o
ac3200.o       e2100.o        ibmtr.o        plip.o         via-rhine.o
acenic.o       eepro.o        lance.o        rl100a.o       yellowfin.o
arcnet.o       eepro100.o     lne390.o       rrunner.o
at1700.o       eexpress.o     ne2k-pci.o     rtl8139.o
cs89x0.o       epic100.o      ne3210.o       sis900.o

---------------------------------------------------

Well, that's what it looks like now, because I added the
file 8390.o from another system (SuSE 6.2) because it
looks like the D-Link DE660 PC card requires the module
8390.o, not something like de660.o.

And then I thought - now I'll just collapse this minix
file system that I've mounted and modified back into
a file. But... how on earth do you turn a minix file system
into a file?
I tried "dd":

---------------------------------------
emu soft/suse# df net
Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/home1/akenning/softemu/suse/net-mod
                        1353    1230      123     91%   /home1/akenning/softemu/suse/net 

emu soft/suse# dd if=net of=zzz.dat
dd: net: Is a directory
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
---------------------------------------


I just can't think of anything to get that file 8390.o into
that frozen minix file system.

It's odd that SuSE provide the module as part of the 
SuSE 6.2 distribution, but it isn't on the "modules"
disk for the SuSE 7.1 distribution.
And yet there's heaps of spare space on the disk.

Neither the mkfs.minix nor dd manuals seem to be helpful.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
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