Baslinux mailing list

[Ian Scott <mriscott AT yahoo.co.uk>]

> My problem is that I can not see the contents of the disks (floppy and 
> cdrom). I try the following:
> 
> ls -lo /dev/floppy - The light goes on again. and it shows the size of a 
>blank floppy isntead of a written floppy.

The problem here is that stuff under /dev is raw devices (how linux sees the
floppy drive, hard drives, serial port, etc).

You want to look at where it was mounted.

In your case this is /mnt/floppy.

The syntax of the mount command is:
mount [-t type] (device) (mount-point)

e.g.

mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

Means mount an ext2 (linux) formatted floppy from the fd0 device (floppy 
drive)
under /mnt/floppy

ls /mnt/floppy should see your files.

copying direct to /dev/fd0 will mess up the formatting on your floppy, and is
probably not what you want to do.

Word to the wise - generally be careful writing to anything under /dev.  I 
knew
someone once who did something like
cat somefile >/dev/hda1
 - which overwrote his entire hard disk!!!