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

[Jeff Vian]

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?

One question and thought.

1.  Does the light on the floppy drive come on when you issue the dd 
command to write to it?
        If so it may not be a crash/freeze but rather the write command 
may be required to complete before it can be interrupted.  In this case, 
just wait for the time required to complete the write.
       
        I suspect this is the real issue.  You indicate a freeze and not 
an actual crash in the way you describe the events.