Re: [Bug-grub] Followup-while making grub floppy `Permission denied

[Carel Fellinger]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2001 at 08:21:32AM +1000, Jason Thomas wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 10:10:43AM +0200, Robert Siemer wrote:
> > From: Jason Thomas <address@hidden>
> > 
> > > the capacity of the floppy should not come into it as its such a small
> > > amount, it doesn't need to be formatted.
> > 
> > But it needs to be low-level formatted, otherwise format auto
> > detection code will fail...  (-:
> 
> can you explain that to me?  when you dd the image onto the floppy it
> overwrites whatever is on the floppy in that location.  dd is not
> format, You can take an image of a floppy using dd and write it to
> another floppy and they will be identical
> 
> or am I lost!

Thanks to that Bill that's got paid too often we are now stuck with a
double meaning of "format".  Let me explain.

Before a floppy (or any disk for that matter) can be used it's surface
must first be devided into tracks and sectors.  This used to be called
"format", some stick to that name, others try to help the blind and use
"low-level format" now.  This formatting determines how much data will
fit on the disk and how big the smallest chunk (the sector, normally
256 bytes) is.

After this low-level format the floppy can be accessed as a block device,
so dd on it works.  But it still lacks a file system, so normal commands
like ls and cp don't know where to look for file names and allocation
tables.  Just put a file system on it with mkfs-whatever and your fine.

Sometime ago some started calling low-level format combined with putting
a file system on a floppy "format".

-- 
groetjes, carel