FasciNATEion Blog

Recently, I just got some Legacy software. Woo!
On floppy disk. What is this, 1990?

So, my beta/Old PC was the only one that had a disk drive. And that computer had Debian linux.

So, let’s get these to my pc!

Step 1:
Make sure the floppy drive works.

mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0

If that says something like

mount: /dev/fd0: can't read superblock

, then open up your computer and make sure that the floppy drive works. This happened to me, and apparently I had forgotten to.. well.. hook up the drive.... remember to do that.
SU up to root in case you can’t mount.
Tip: you have to specify a filesystem format when you mount the drive. -t is the switch that does so.

Step 2:
If the above step works, you’ve mounted the drive. You’re going to need the following two commands:

• md5sum – but only if you have more than one disk involved with your ISO burning work.
• mkisofs

md5sum is to help you verify that, when you are mounting and unmounting disks, that your unmount attempts are working.

how to install MD5sum on debian linux

apt-get install isomd5sum

How to burn ISOs in Debian Linux– required step: install mkisofs

apt-get install mkisofs

OK. So now that you have the required software,

Step 3:

mkisofs -r -o /path/to/desired/ISO/file/newFileName-0.iso /media/floppy0

The above step creates the ISO file.
Then, umount your disk. Make sure to leave the /media/floppy0 folder if you were just in there! You can’t unmount a folder you’re in.

umount /media/floppy0

Repeat step 1 as many times as necessary.

Step 4: (optional)
Use md5sum to check the MD5 of a file. Do this with the ISO files you want to compare.

~# md5sum /path/to/desired/ISO/file/newFileName-*
a583c9cc94c11d0e35b4967b79f979a0  /path/to/desired/ISO/file/newFileName-0.iso
7f15179dbc68c18b2f91ecd9365b7c70  /path/to/desired/ISO/file/newFileName-1.iso

If you have more than one matching MD5 answer (first column), the files are likely to be the same.

Step 5:
Make sure to unmount the last disk, and then transfer your files to your destination computer.

Stay cool, viewers!

The URL I used to help myself with this:
http://vertito.blogspot.com/2007/08/iso-creation-and-cddvd-burning-from.html

Tags: burn, burn ISO, burning ISO, disk, files, floppy, ISO, isomd5sum, md5, mkisofs, mount

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Computers, Debian, linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.