>From Fergus Daly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Ninewells Hospital and Medical School
Dundee, DD1 9SY, Scotland
To Tom's Floppy Users <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date 20000719 1730 GMT
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I really have looked through the list server archive as a knowledge base
for Tom's Floppy, but I haven't found anything helpful on the following.
(I know this isn't a Linux Forum or tutorial, and I _have_ tried to be
more or less Tom-specific.)
If it's relevant, I'm using 1.7.205 after a long and rewarding time
with 1.7.185.
PRACTICE AND USAGE
1. Suppose a Pentium PC, floppy drive, hard drive and a conventional
cheap inkjet (actually HP DeskJet 500) on LPT1. Boot the PC from
Tom's Floppy. Is it necessary in some sense to "mount" the printer,
in order to use it? Once done, how do I print a simple ASCII file
(say, myfile.txt on /fl)? A man entry?
2. Suppose two PCs sitting on the same workbench. I want to get some of
the contents of the hard drive on PC1 copied to the hard drive on
PC2. (I could take a screwdriver and put HD1 as a second drive in
PC2, and copy from /dev/hda to /dev/hdb with or without using Tom's
Floppy - actually, this _is_ what I did.)
But could I make a cable connection between them and get PC2, booted
from Tom's Floppy, to "recognise" PC1? I have the Laplink yellow
parallel LPT1-LPT1 connector that can be used to transport files from
PC1 to PC2. Come to that I have the blue Laplink serial COM-COM
connector too. (But I don't want to use Laplink.)
RESCUE AND RECOVERY
Mainly, I use Tom's Floppy for endless scrutiny and file management. But
I know other users have used it for its matchless rescue and recovery
capabilities. (Presumably, this occurs most of the time when files and
devices are physically intact but the boot logic or conventional file
access procdures have gone out of the window?)
1. I've tried it when attempting to rescue as much as possible from old
and flaky floppies, when MS o/s shows only
Data error reading drive A
or
Scandisk encountered a data error while reading
the FAT on drive A
or similar messages. In such cases
mount /dev/fd0h1440 /fl
fails too; or, at any rate, results in
Data CRC error
messages. Is there a standard, or recommended, or preferred -- or
even just a "suggested"?!) -- way of rescuing (maybe not everything,
but as much as possible, from) flaky floppies?
By the way v.205 is just great for mounting NTFS partitions: and I have
had no trouble writing to them ... I had inferred from the list server
archives that they might turn out to be read-only.
Fergus
