On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Bob Keyes wrote:

I am creating a single flopy linux, and it would be useful to have two different partition types on the floppy (one msdos, the other squashfs). I can use fdisk on the floppy easily enough, but how do I access the partitions I have created?

The floppy driver is not designed to let you use partitions inside a floppy. It is possible that by faking it with a loopback mount or somesuch you could have the hard disk driver do so for you. In particular, the floppy driver doesn't use its minor devices to refer to different slices of the disk, but instead to refer to different ways of formatting it, and this would be a pretty fundamental change.

I imagine it could be done in user mode and by just physically dividing the disk at some arbitrary point, especially if you are going to load it into a ramdisk anyway. In that case, have it start out MSDOS for the first track or two and then switch over. You could format as MSDOS first and then overwrite all the later tracks, just treating the floppy as a linear file.

+-----------------------------------------------------------+ | David C Niemi (Reston, VA, USA) niemi at tuxers dot net | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Percentage of PCs using TCP/IP in 1993: 3.9 (source: IDC) | +-----------------------------------------------------------+

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