[gentoo-amd64] Re: FAT tools, where ?

[Duncan]

Barry Schwartz posted on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:36:48 -0600 as excerpted:

> Depending on what the DOS fs stuff is for, sys-fs/ntfs3g might be a
> better option, anyway, though I have a vfat partition from before I
> discovered ntfs3g, and would keep dosfstools (and the kernel support)
> and/or mtools around anyway, for working with those very occasional
> floppies.

As I said, I've been formatting those ext2.  Now that ext4 is available 
without journaling, perhaps I'll eventually switch to it.

The only other thing I do with floppies is copy premade FreeDOS images to 
them, for stuff like flashing BIOSs.  My board is now EOLed and no more 
flashes for it, but I had a clean 1.44 floppy FreeDOS OEM image that I'd 
copy, loopback-mount the copy, copy in the new flash executable and BIOS 
bin image, umount, dd the image direct to /dev/fd0, verify it, then boot 
to the floppy and flash the BIOS.  Unfortunately, the last one I did 
killed the BIOS as I had a stick of bad memory that caused it to write 
corruption, so I had to order from Cali a new BIOS chip flashed to the 
last update, but until then, the system worked well.  But other than 
that, the only floppies I've done for years have been ext2.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman