Mounting a floppy disk

I thought mounting a floppy drive in obsd would be the same as in linux, but it's not. Depending on the distro, in linux you could do:

# mount /dev/fd0 /floppy

but not so in obsd.

I had a floppy I wanted to go from my win2k machine to my standalone obsd box, so it was msdos formatted. I went to /mnt and created a floppy dir

# cd /mnt
# mkdir floppy

Then you have to mount the floppy:

# mount -t msdos /dev/fd0c /mnt/floppy

The -t msdos tells mount to use msdos instead of the default ffs filesystem. Then you put whatever you want in /mnt/floppy and it goes on the floppy. Works the same of course with deleting files.

I did more looking after that and found out how to format a floppy and mount it for the ffs filesystem.

First, as root, do a format. This will also verify that the floppy is OK. When you put in a bad disk like I did, it'll spit some garbage on the screen, but don't worry cause it'll keep going.

# fdformat fd0

Next we need to partition the floppy. Use disklabel:

# disklabel -E fd0

Initial label editor (enter '?' for help at any prompt)
> p

device: /dev/rfd0c
type: floppy
disk: floppy disk
label: fictitious
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 18
tracks/cylinder: 2
sectors/cylinder: 36
cylinders: 80

total sectors: 2880
free sectors: 2880
rpm: 300

16 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  c:     2880        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 79)
> a a
offset: [0]

size: [2880]
FS type: [4.2BSD]
> w
> q
No label changes.
#

Constructing the actual file system is next (if you skipped the disklabel part, use fd0c instead of fd0a). We'll use the command newfs for this:

# newfs fd0a

...and mount your floppy:

# mount -t ffs /dev/fd0a /mnt

As you can see, that's slightly different from the way we mounted the msdos disk. You can even leave off the -t ffs since that is the filesystem that mount will default to.