ANNOUNCING: RAWFD
What: rawfd.exe is a raw floppy disk device driver and control program
for DOS that allows you to format a floppy and ftp or copy an entire
raw disk image directly onto it in a single step, without using any
harddisk space.
Why: Downloading the floppies for a linux distribution is the single
most time consuming part of doing a linux installation. There
are two standard formats for downloaded disks: multiple DOS
files on a DOS formatted diskette, and a single raw image of
the entire disk. All current linux distributions use the
raw image method for the boot diskette. Most distributions use
the DOS method for all other diskettes, while TAMU uses raw
images for all diskettes. The advantages of the raw image
method are that it requires fewer diskettes (you don't waste
space on the DOS file system), and it is easier to do on
unix machines, as mounting diskettes as filesystems is normally
a restricted operation. The disadvantage of this method was
that on DOS machines you had to ftp the image to a hard disk,
and then rawrite the image to floppy. In some cases, people
had access only to machines which lacked either space or
permission to put the images on harddisk.
With RAWFD, DOS machines can now do the format, ftp, and
rawrite operations directly to the floppy in a single step,
without any use of harddisk.
How: rawfd.exe is a DOS device driver that can be installed either
with a "device=rawfd.exe" in config.sys, or directly by
running "rawfd" at the DOS command prompt. Once installed,
it creates two devices "rawfda" and "rawfdb" (for drives
a: and b: respectively) which can then be copied or ftp'ed
to as any normal file. For example, using ftp, you would
simply do "get boot rawfda" to ftp the "boot" disk image to
the floppy in drive a. If you already have a local copy of
the disk image, you can replace "rawrite" with a simple
"copy /b boot rawfda". By default, the raw device driver
formats the diskette during transfer, although this option
can be turned on and off as desired. Rawfd uses track
buffering for extremely high speed operation.
Where: Source and binaries are available in
net.tamu.edu:pub/linux/dos_utils
Note that pub/linux/os2_utils includes a version of "dd"
for os/2 to enable ftp directly to floppy on those machines.
Questions/Comments: dave.safford@net.tamu.edu
