mounting a floppy in hpux

[Fermin Jamieson]

What is the big secret about mounting a floppy device using unix on a hpux box. I have looked in the unix books and on the internet. Some how I can't find any answers relating to this command. I used '/mount /dev/floppy/c0t1d0 /mnt', the floppy unit lights up, but will not mount to directory /mnt. I keep getting '/dev/floppy/c0t1d0' not found.

Please help//

[James A. Donovan]

Are you sure the path isn't supposed to be /dev/dsk/c0t1d0?

i.e.

mount /dev/dsk/c0t1d0 /mnt

[Fermin Jamieson]

I got the information from 'ioscan -funC floppy' Reply was always '/dev/floppy/c0t1d0'

[James A. Donovan]

I found this in the knowledge base...

http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000062944135

[RAC_1 · Accepted solution]

Check the following thread.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=11093

Anil

[Bill Hassell]

The big secret is that HP-UX is not DOS so unless you formatted the floppy and created an HP-UX filesystem on the floppy (which takes several Kbytes), you can never mount the floppy. HP-UX understands HFS and VxFS filesystems but has no provision to integrate a foreign filesystem into a local mountpoint. There are some commands that can be used to look at the raw floppy: dosls, doscp, etc. Use the raw device file for these commands (per the man pages).

[Naveej.K.A]

Yes...
I have come across some old E45 servers having the floppy drive. The customer use to used dosformat, doscp or the tar or cpio to copy or extract files.
But have never seen them mounting to a mount point.

regds
Naveej

[Fermin Jamieson]

JimD.
My op system is hpux11, so I didn't have to adjust the kernel, all I had to do was to used step 5 thru 8 and wallah.. I have a floppy drive on my C160 workstation and now I can use it. I also put step6 thru 8 in a script to use later, which make this task much easer. Now,is it possible to mount a dos disk? or am I in for another long research.
Anyway thanks for your help.
Ferm

[Trond Haugen]

In line with this, you can't mount a new disk until you have created a filesystem on it.
Back when floppies where more common. Like on HP workstations running Pascal or BASIC LIF was the format and you could access the floppies thru the rew device with lifls, lifcp.
Likewise DOS format floppies would use dosls, doscp.
Back then you COULD run newfs on a fluppy and get a tiny filesystem. Don't know if you are able to pvcreate, vgcreate and lvreate. But if so there would be no practical space left i guess.
Oh and by the way you can tar, cpio and dd to t floppy too.

Regards,
Trond

[Bill Hassell]

No research necessary--you can never mount a DOS/Windows floppy, just like you can't mount a Mac floppy. These operating systems all have proprietary formats for their filesystems and there is no code in HP-UX to integrate them into mounted filesystems. The only choices you have for DOS floppies are the (very clunky to use) dosls and doscp commands.