DOS floppies under SunOS 4.1.1
>Greetings,
>
>In a recent message on "sun-managers", someone mentioned in passing that SunOS
>4.1.1 supports reading/writing DOS floppies directly; that is, you don't need
>DOS Windows or "mtools" or any other extra software. Well, I've looked all
>over in TFM, and I can't find anything. The man page for "dos" is dated 1988,
>and it's for 386i machines. Does anyone out there know any more about this?
>
>Thanks.
I've already gotten 3 responses, all saying the same thing:
What you want is called "pcfs".
However, I don't have a man page for "pcfs", so I'm still not sure where to
look in the manuals. Oh well.
Here are the responses I received:
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From: "Anthony A. Datri" <uunet!lovecraft.convex.com!datri>
>4.1.1 has a filesystem type "pcfs". The install procedure even puts a
>mount in the fstab:
>
>/dev/fd0 /pcfs pcfs rw,noauto 0 0
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: James J Dempsey <uunet!alexander.bbn.com!jjd>
>Stick a dos 1.44M (maybe others?) floppy in the drive and mount it
>with -t pcfs. You can format a dos floppy with fdformat -d.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: uunet!Corp.Sun.COM!exile (Keith Abbey - TSE)
>The man page entry is pcfs. It really works!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In his summary on "SPARC floppies and DOS and Mac", William F. Mitchell says:
>The early responses seemed to all direct me towards 4.1.1 (which I haven't
>gotten yet). Since 4.1.1 includes support for PC filesystems (PCFS),
>you might think that there wouldn't be an issue--just upgrade to 4.1.1, right?
>
>Not necessarily. Yeah, 4.1.1 will deal with the DOS floppies. It can read,
>write, even format DOS floppies. The problem, I am told, is that it is
>a pain in the neck to use because you have to become root, edit /etc/fstab,
>mount, and unmount the floppy. Moreover, the output from commands that
>list directory contents are not like what you get from the DOS DIR command.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to all who responded.
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