On Mon, 5 Feb 2001, Henry Nelson wrote:

> I've been trying to get "instfs.tgz" (also, "disk2.fs" available from
> other mirrors) to go onto a floppy, but it is a no go.  I've tried
> three different disks, including a brand new one right out of the box.
>
> I get all V's with fdformat, but regardless of what bs= is set to, dd
> stops with the error "dd: /dev/rfd0a: Invalid argument."  At bs=36k
> recommended in INSTALL.html, only 1363968 bytes are transferred.  All
> three of the floppies tried stopped at the same place.  At bs=512, it
> goes as far as 1381888.  "instfs.tgz" is 1382238 bytes.

Your #2 floppy is probably fine. The second disk isn't a full disk on
any platform. This works for me

	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rfd0a bs=18k
	dd if=foo.fs of=/dev/rfd0a bs=18k conv=notrunc

The "conv=notrunc" means not to try to write any more bytes than are
in "foo.fs". Setting blocksize without that will end up padding
blocks, which shouldn't really hurt anything, but it might try to
write past the end of the disk with certain blocksizes. "conv=notrunc"
tends to avoid these alarming errors.


Frederick