dd if=* of=/dev/fd0 freezing my computer.

[Rick Stevens]

Matt Morgan wrote:
> Now that I have a working floppy drive, I have a whole new topic to 
> start. Y'all are gonna get sick of my floppy drive.
> 
> dd is crashing my computer. I'm trying to write floppy disk boot images, 
> with
> 
> dd if=whatever.img of=/dev/fd0
> 
> and invariably my system freezes. Can't ctrl-alt-f1, can't alt-tab, 
> can't anything. Mouse pointer disappears, nothing moves. All I can do is 
> cycle power.
> 
> As far as I can tell, everything else about the floppy is working. I can 
> format disks and read and write them, I can read and write DOS-formatted 
> disks, etc.
> 
> In case it matters, the images I'm writing are mainly boot floppy images 
> from the Mandrake Linux 10 Community Edition install (CD 1). I know the 
> CD they come from burned OK; the checksums work out and I can boot from 
> it, etc. But just in case it had anything to do with the images 
> themselves, I took a Debian boot floppy, wrote it to disk with
> 
> dd if=/dev/fd0 of=debian.boot.img
> 
> (which worked fine). Then I tried to write it back to another disk, with 
> the reverse, and my computer froze. So even dd images I create on this 
> FC 1 computer are crashing it.
> 
> Any ideas?

Try specifying the block size.  You can try:

	dd if=/some/image of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k (all at once)
	dd if=/some/image of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k (should get 1440 writes)

You get the idea.  I'd try the second one and see where it poops out.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     If you can't beat your computer at chess...try kickboxing!     -
----------------------------------------------------------------------