Floppy question

[Victor Odhner]

When you have a floppy in your Linux system,
mounted as a filesystem (e.g., /mnt/floppy),
you should not remove it without first doing
a umount.  For one thing, the floppy might be
corrupted if you had written to it, assuming
the buffers might not have been flushed out
to the floppy; and the new floppy might also
be corrupted, if Linux thinks it still has
the previous floppy.  Some such effects are
also possible under DOS and Windows under
some circumstances.

I would expect that when you mount the next floppy,
the new directory info should be read by
the system.

With DOS and especially Windows, I notice
that the whole contents of a floppy might
be held in memory after I copy to it.
So if I want to check the contents of a
floppy after I write to it, I first remove
the floppy; reference it so the system sees
that it's been removed; and then stick it
back in, so the system will look to see
what it's got now.  But under Linux, I
expect that mount / umount should keep
everything coordinated.

Mac has an interesting approach.  You don't
get your floppy back into your hot little
hand until you drag its icon into the trash
(a strange metaphor), then the floppy pops
out.  If you shut down the mac with the
floppy still in place, and manually remove
it (by poking a paper clip into a tiny hole),
the Mac will complain bitterly when it comes
back up.  So the whole process is software
controlled to ensure integrity -- just
another part of the "training wheels" bit.

Vic

Jim wrote:
> 
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> How do I get my system to reread the contents of the floppy?  When I do an ls
> - -la I see the stuff that I created on a floppy a while back.  I now have a
> different floppy in it, but it still lists the old data files.
> 
> TIA
> - --
> Jim
> 
> Freedom is worth preserving
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