Here I am, going great guns extracting old DisplayWrite 3 files from my stash
of 5-1/4 inch floppy disks, when an unexpected consequence develops: I had
made a series of about twenty disk images with the FC5025 hardware and
software described previously, but I was converting them right on my NAS
(network attached storage hard drive, running a linux operating system, I
recall) when I discovered that the converted files, now plain text, had all
disappeared. For some, even the folders in which they resided had
disappeared.
My mistake, it would appear, was in assuming that my act of copying the
mounted folders from my Trisquel 7 installation to my NAS created permanent
files on the NAS; maybe I had copied their "mountedness" as well because the
two file structures are locally the same.
Not so fast. For the one batch of ten, I had also copied the image files to a
higher directory on the NAS. Those folders just lost the converted files,
which I had converted on a *XP computer and saved back to the NAS. A later
batch of ten folders had had the image files mounted into them with the
Trisquel computer, but I had not copied the image files to their own places
on the NAS like I had with the first batch. That later batch of ten folders
had lost, not just their supposedly mounted contents (written with the mount
command, using the -o loop syntax) but also all their converted files, as
well as the folders. Poof ... gone.
Fortunately what I lost was just a couple of hours of work.
I have now "corrected" the situation by copying all the image files onto the
*XP's hard drive along with the folders containing the mounted versions of
those image files, where the idiosyncrasies of linux cannot interfere. I had
been trying to simplify my operations by putting the conversions onto the NAS
where I could copy them two ways from there - onto the Trisquel computer and
also, in a second operation, onto the *XP computer, each one of which is a
mirror of the other.
I suspect that what I had been doing wrong was not realizing that while
Trisquel was placing mounted image files onto the NAS, the NAS was
temporarily mounted and a part of the Trisquel operating system, and that
while I was thinking that I was "saving" files from the converter software on
the *XP into what I thought was that same NAS, I was not really saving
anything into the Trisquel computer, even though it looked that way from the
perspective of the converter software on the *XP computer. The Trisquel
installation simply ignored what the *XP computer was telling me it was doing
to it through the NAS.
Nice - that's one of the strengths of linux, it would seem. I cannot sneak
into Trisquel by way of that NAS without asking nicely through an ftp
program.
Have I got this right, or have I discovered a "feature" of the following
command ?
> sudo mount -t msdos ~/Desktop/Floppies/disk000x.img
~/Desktop/Floppies/DW3/Disk-000x -o loop