> 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?
Well, there are 2 answers. Answer 1 is, tomsrtbt is for rescue and
recovery, and system administration, and printers are not important enough
to support. Answer 2 is, download lp.o.bz2 from the add-ons, and do the
command "insmod lp.o", without that the kernel *does not* support
printers. Then, "cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp0" will probably make the
printer do something (or maybe "cat myfile.txt > /dev/lp1"). P.S., You
did NOT do a very good job of researching, come-on, start
with: http://linuxdoc.org/ if you just need to learn how printing works
also http://www.geek-girl.com/unix.html or http://www.ugu.com/, the reason
I say I am not a Unix teacher is because there are so many freaking
resources already if you give a half-assed effort with a search
engine. Maybe you have never used "www.yahoo.com", which is only the most
well-known web site in the world?
> 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.)
This is covered in the archives, basically, the parallel cable is a PLIP
cable, see "PLIP". The serial one, use "SLIP". Both PLIP and SLIP are
supported by tomsrtbt, for exactly this situation.
> 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
It is not intended for reading crappy floppies. It is intended for
reading expensive SCSI tapes. Or zip disks, or ide tapes, or cdroms, or
high-quality new floppies. For reading a crappy floppy, you might as well
use a FULL linux distribution with the read_crappy_old_floppies package,
after all, tomsrtbt is for when your SYSTEM CANNOT BOOT LINUX FROM THE
HARD DRIVE. _NOT_ to fulfill all Linux needs, not even for "general
rescue and recovery" broadly defined.
> 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?
Maybe some others on the list can offer some help.
I will tell you what I do: When I get *ANY* error from a floppy, I break
it in half, and throw it away. Immediately, period. I *NEVER* store
*ANYTHING* on a floppy I care about. Hold the metal parts firmly so that
they don't fly across the room and get lost...
You can always use "dd if=/dev/fd0 of=filename" then use "skip" and
"seek" options of dd to get around hard errors, then use a hex editor and
a book on FAT filesystems to fix it manually... good luck...
> 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.
I will try to remember to turn it off. It is unreliable and I don't want
to get blamed when you trash your system.
-Tom...
