Baslinux mailing list

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Sam Heywood wrote:
>
> From the instructions I've read here on on this list about
> how that is done it seems to me that doing that would be a 
> real geeky and complicated procedure.  

Certainly those instructions for dd were a bit "geeky",
but the "split" method is something completely different.
"split" is a DOS executable (if you are running Windows,
there might be a Windows equivalent).  Just tell split
(using a parameter) how big the chunks should be and
it will split the file into those size chunks.

I copy of split comes with BasicLinux 2.1.  To make chunks
that will fit on a floppy drive:
-------------------------------
split <filename> part /p /s1440
-------------------------------
<filename> is the name of the file you wish to split. part
says to name the chunks: part.001, part.002, etc.  /p says
to split the file on page boundaries (rather than just
anywhere).  /s1440 sets the maximum chunk size.

> Maybe it wouldn't be as complicated after all to just copy 
> stuff from my hard drive to my ram drive, but, as I've said 
> before, I don't know how that is done either.

You can copy it from floppy to ramdisk if you prefer
(assuming you have enough RAM for a ramdisk at /tmp).
Just copy the first chunk into the ramdisk, umount the
first floppy, mount the second floppy.  Assuming that
part.001 is in /tmp and part.002 is in /mnt, then the 
following should work:
----------------------------------
cat /mnt/part.002 >> /tmp/part.001
----------------------------------
The entire file is now in part.001.  Just rename it to
the original name.

> > Have you mounted your harddrive?
> 
> I did that a few times back when I was doing BasicLinux 1.7.
> I was able to mount some hard drives but not others.  On
> the ones that would not mount I got an error message saying 
> something to the efect that the file system type isn't 
> recognized.

BL2 is able to recognize msdos, vfat and iso9660 filesystems.
It does not recognize NTFS (used by current Windows).  There 
is a module that adds the ability to recognize NTFS (read-only 
I think).  It is available in Slackware 7.1, but I have never 
used it myself (since I have never had that type of computer).

Cheers,
Steven