Mounting floppies

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <4714 at sneaky.TANDY.COM> gordon at sneaky.UUCP (Gordon Burditt) writes:
>
>A long time ago I wrote a program that allowed users to mount floppies
>"safely".
[...]
>It didn't work.  It was trivial to defeat, by a method similar to this:

If you are going to go to the bother of reading the whole floppy before
actually mounting it, why not just make a floppy-sized partition on the
hard disk and copy the whole thing in where you can work at a reasonable
speed?  Then of course, you might as well not use a file system on the
floppy - just cpio or tar the files (and then you don't need the separate
partition on the hard disk which was just to make sure that the contents
would fit back on the floppy when you were done).

A nifty alternative is the "mtools" package posted by Emmet Grey, if you
have a 5 1/4 or 3 1/2" floppy drive.  It allows reading/writing MSDOS
formatted disks under unix.  This makes a fairly portable way to store
files since nearly everyone these days has some way to get a file from
a PC into their machine.  You sometimes have to work to preserve the unix
names and attributes but you can cpio or zoo the files first if necessary.

Les Mikesell