writing to FAT32 3113

Dances With Crows

that is, w.r.t. floppies

I'd better explain a bit more about my circumstances. I inherited a Pentium 2, and when I got a new hard drive I parbreastioned its disc for Linux & Windows. I'm dealing with a Windows XP Pro-Linux system which is in roughly the state it was left in a year ago by someone I engaged to fix my own slightly faulty installation of Red Hat Linux 9 and Windows, but his installation while fixing my problems seemed to have introduced others. He, like me, was unable to get Linux to see a modem whether it was external (serial non-USB port) or internal (Winmodem or hard modem). I quickly got malware running MSIE on the nets, and then my consultant's surgery to extirpate it cut out some MSIE vitals, so I reverted for a while to MS-DOS and shareware Net Tamer. Then I shipped off my modem cards to someone else who got them working easily with her Linux box and was going to put together a new system for me (having earned my respect by beating out my local consultant), but things got delayed interminably due to her personal problems.

Meantime I've been shuttling floppies back & forth to the college where I teach, using their high-speed Internet cx and their Windows systems. So I use these floppies a lot, rw both ways, Windows-Linux.

I use the Red Hat-supplied GUI (Nautilus) because the instructions so strongly recommended it, although my tendency is to prefer command-line over GUI interfaces; I'm used to both now, but Nautilus does slow things down. The way I had things previously with Windows 98, the Windows FAT parbreastion was automounted in Linux. Unfortunately my consultant said he couldn't do that, although he did make sure the Windows XP Pro was laid down FAT32 rather than NTFS, and indeed the Red Hat-Nautilus hardware browser "saw" a FAT32 parbreastion there, but couldn't see "below" it.

Anyway, I (as root) started manually mounting floppies via the default, mountdev-fd0mnt-floppy . That worked fine most of the time, but sometimes the floppies (all formatted FAT) got corrupted going in one direction or the other. Also, I noticed that when first mounted in the "other" OS (whichever of Windows or Linux it had NOT been last used with), the drive would grind mysteriously for a while before being ready. I had the impression each OS was giving the floppy a delousing before letting it pbutt thru its own Ellis Is.

So I finally resorted to man mount, which said the default (auto recognition) should not be used "if you value your data". So I started using

mount -t vfatdev-fd0mnt-floppy

which was fine, but came out read-only. (Sometimes I'd just mcopy a:file.) If I wanted to write from Linux I had to revert to

mountdev-fd0mnt-floppy

and incur whatever risk, which doesn't seem to be a problem lately. I'll repeat that the corruption incidents may have been physical. I do handle them a bit roughly and break a few.

So I only recently decided, why not mount -t vfatdev-hda0mnt-windows ? Works fine for reading, but I was afraid to try writing to or modifying the files or directories.

Anyway, my immediate desire is to back up my Linux data to CD. I was able to burn data via the USB reader-writer I have to CD from Windows, but not from Linux. Linux reads the data via the USB device, and its GUI SAYS it's writing to it, but the pilot light doesn't go on and the data don't get laid down. So I plan to make a new Windows directory, copy my Linux data there, and burn the CD from there. (Eventually of course I want to get Linux to run the modem and the CD burner. Lately I've been unable to get even MSDOS to see a modem, so I could run my Net Tamer or even my shell account to access the nets. Last time I had to fool around a long time with BIOS settings.)

in

Would I have a fstab entry if I only manually mount the FAT discs (hard disc parbreastion or floppy)?

Man mount lists that parameter.

Robert