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