Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!chinet!les From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Mounting floppies Message-ID: <7035@chinet.chi.il.us> Date: 29 Nov 88 23:14:41 GMT References: <129@minya.UUCP> <8800002@gistdev> <5682@louie.udel.EDU> <4714@sneaky.TANDY.COM> Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix Lines: 23 In article <4714@sneaky.TANDY.COM> gordon@sneaky.UUCP (Gordon Burditt) writes: > >A long time ago I wrote a program that allowed users to mount floppies >"safely". [...] >It didn't work. It was trivial to defeat, by a method similar to this: If you are going to go to the bother of reading the whole floppy before actually mounting it, why not just make a floppy-sized partition on the hard disk and copy the whole thing in where you can work at a reasonable speed? Then of course, you might as well not use a file system on the floppy - just cpio or tar the files (and then you don't need the separate partition on the hard disk which was just to make sure that the contents would fit back on the floppy when you were done). A nifty alternative is the "mtools" package posted by Emmet Grey, if you have a 5 1/4 or 3 1/2" floppy drive. It allows reading/writing MSDOS formatted disks under unix. This makes a fairly portable way to store files since nearly everyone these days has some way to get a file from a PC into their machine. You sometimes have to work to preserve the unix names and attributes but you can cpio or zoo the files first if necessary. Les Mikesell