I wrote:

> > 	There appeared to be absolutely no way to interrupt the dd process
> > to make this horrible nightmare come to a stop, until it had completed the
> > entire floppy's worth of data.

Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov> wrote:

>So, I just tried to reproduce this... I dd'd a floppy image onto a 3.5''
>write protected floppy... I got exactly one "hard error" message, and
>dd promptly exited with an error condition.  So, I have two questions:

>	- What exact command did you type?

	Actually, I had a compressed image of an empty msdos filesystem
which I was trying to put on the disk. Surprisingly, an image of an empty
DOS disk compresses very well the second time:

		% cat msdos.gz.gz | gunzip | gunzip | dd of=/dev/fd0a

>	- What version of NetBSD are you running?

	I'm running roughly Dec5 sources; my fd.c, compared to the most
recently supped one:

	> /*    $NetBSD: fd.c,v 1.97 1996/10/21 22:27:40 thorpej Exp $  */
	---
	< /*    $NetBSD: fd.c,v 1.102 1996/12/01 00:43:45 jonathan Exp $ */

I compared the full diff of my fd.c to the most recent one, the only changes
have to do with the fdformat additions from freebsd.

Cheers,
Phil
--
Phillip F Knaack
Systems Administrator, Information Development for Extension Audiences (IDEA)
Iowa State University Extension