Saving to a floppy disk in Unix

Formatting a floppy disk

A preformatted MS-DOS 3.5-inch, high-density disk with 1.44 megabytes of capacity will work for saving to and from a Unix workstation. You can use the same disk in a PC-compatible computer as well.

NOTE: Double-sided or double-density disks or disks that do not have 1.44 megabytes of capacity will NOT work with the Unix workstations.

To reformat a DOS 3.5-inch, high-density disk with 1.44 megabytes of capacity:

1. Insert the disk into the workstation floppy disk drive.
2. At the unity% or eos% prompt type
   
   mformat a:

To format a 3.5-inch blank disk (or if the process above did not work):

1. Insert the disk into the workstation floppy disk drive.
2. At the unity% or eos% prompt type fdformat. NOTE: The fdformat command is only available on Sun workstations.
3. After the disk is formatted, type mformat a: at the unity% or eos% prompt.

Saving to a floppy disk from Unity

1. Insert the disk into the workstation floppy disk drive.
2. At the unity% or eos% prompt change into the directory that you want to copy file(s) from.
3. After you are in the directory, at the unity% or eos% prompt type mcopy filename a: (filename should be the name of the file on Unity that you want to copy).

Checking to see if saving worked

After saving to disk using the process above, at the unity% or eos% prompt type

mdir

to list the files on the disk. If you see the name of the file that you were trying to save, then the save was successful. If you do not see it, repeat the process above.

Saving from a floppy disk to Unity

1. Insert the disk into the workstation floppy disk drive.
2. At the unity% or eos% prompt change into the Unity directory that you want to copy the file into.
3. At the unity% or eos% prompt type mcopy a:dosfilename unixfilename (dosfilename is the name of the file on the disk that you are copying, unixfilename is what name you want to save the file under in the Unity space).

NOTE: The dosfilename and unixfilename can be the same.

NOTE: There should be no space between the a: and the dosfilename. There should be one space between the dosfilename and unixfilename.

Checking to see if copying worked

After saving to Unity from a disk using the process above, at the unity% or eos% prompt type

ls

to list the files in the Unity directory. If you see the name of the file that you were trying to copy, then the copy was successful. If you do not see it, repeat the process above.

Ejecting a floppy disk

First check to see if the workstation has a manual eject button on the floppy drive. If it does, press the button to eject the diskette. Otherwise (such as if you are using a Sun workstation) use the following procedure:

1. At the unity% prompt, type
   
   eject
   
2. If that doesn't work try typing
   
   eject floppy

Last modified October 19, 2005 by cawalker