(I sent it again because It doesn't appear on my ELKS list, sorry if you
receive twice this message)
At 22:44 5/03/00 +0000, you wrote:
Hi Riley and others,
>There are two points that need considering:
>
> 1. Larger block sizes are indeed faster up to a point.
> However, all floppy disks used on ix86 have a sector
> size of 512 bytes, so anything larger than that is
> meaningless.
>
> 2. Some implementations of the dd command have a bug that
> results in their ignoring the final block if it is not
> the full blocksize in length, and would produce faulty
> floppies if used.
>
>My comments therefore pointed out that...
>
> a. If the dd command is used to write the floppies, it is
> ESSENTIAL that the bs=1 parameter be specified UNLESS
> we can guarantee that the raw kernel image size will be
> a multiple of some larger number.
>
> b. Because of the problem mentioned in (2) above, I would
> NOT recommend the use of the dd command in the install
> guide.
I understand now what you say.
>
>Noting that the three commands are exactly equivalent as far as
>writing to floppy is concerned, I would recommedn the use of the
>`cp elks.img /dev/fd0` command for producing the floppies simply
>because doing so minimises the likelihood of producing a faulty
>floppy.
>
I sounds more sensible... Matt what do you think about changing your
INSTALL with this process of creating the disks? or anybody knows a good
reason for not changing it?
> > My last question: it could be nicer/better to use
> > conv=noerror,notrunc,sync ?
>
>I'm not sure what you are referring to here, sorry?
>
These are options for the dd commands I read in the dd man page.
conv=flags Convert the input according to one or more (comma-separated)
flags listed below
...
noerror = continue processing when erros occur (up to 5 in a row). Well,
then I thin that this flag it's not useful for us :-).
notrunc = Don't truncate output file
sync = Pad input blocks to ibs
...
Well I this moment I think I am not quite sure if these flags are useful
for our purposes or not. All this stuff is starting to be a bit of mess for
me :-( ....
best regards,
Juanjo
