UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I desperately need to get a text file off of this floppy to resolve a customer issue on one of PC servers in thier all UNIX site. They sent the information on a UNIX formatted floppy with the information I need.
Please help me as I need this ASAP.

Black Knight

Hmmmm. This is difficult because Microsoft does not easily support other file systems. If you had a Microsoft floppy disk and needed to put the info on a UNIX box; that is pretty easy with many UNIX/MSDOC utilities such as MCOPY, MFORMAT, etc.

Actually, there is 'no such thing' as a "UNIX formatted floppy" because UNIX is a computing environment, not a file system structure. If you have no other choice, you need to find out how the file was created. It is unlikely that a file system was created on the floppy (it could have been, but not the normal approach).

When someone sends a floppy, normally they provide the information on how the disk was created, i.e. was it a TARFILE and what were the flags, etc. Or you could ask the people who created the disk to send one that is formatted to work with DOS-based systems.

Maybe someone else has a better approach or knows of a special DOS utility that will do a raw-read on a floppy to examine its contents?

the disk supposedly is in TAR format? Whatever that means. I downloaded gzip and SAMBA will either of those read this disk?

B.K.

If the disk was in TAR format, there is a TAR utility for Windows that should open the file. GZIP and SAMBA are good, but not what you want to open a TARFILE.

I suggest you go to http://downloads.cnet.com and search for a tar utility for Windows. They have them, I've used them and they work well (unless the files were tarred with a bunch of non-default flags).

Here are one or two that might work:

There are many more available. Please let us know which one works for you (and why) so other readers/searchers may benefit.

[Edited by Neo on 12-12-2000 at 04:28 PM]

Just format and use a new Disk as fat16 under linux... if you have kernel support for fat16.... and copy disk to disk

Greets M.Heuser