Other Reading a floppy disk

I managed to read the contents of a floppy disk the other day by:-

Code:
dd if=/dev/da0 of=floppy.img
and then mounting that on md0.

Is that the best way of doing it? Doesn't seem very elegant.
 
It's a disk. A floppy disk and a hard disk aren't that different. They're both treated the same by the system, it has an X number of blocks, a partition table (MBR) and the partitions have a filesystem (UFS, FAT, etc.). It's a lot smaller than today's hard-drives, USB sticks, etc. yes, but that doesn't change the way it's treated or handled by the system.
 
They're both treated the same by the system, it has an X number of blocks, a partition table (MBR) and the partitions have a filesystem (UFS, FAT, etc.).
Typical floppies used by MS-DOS don't have a partition table and instead just the FAT file system on the bare device.

Of course, as you say, floppies aren't really different from a hard disk, even in this. You can use bare file systems on hard disks, but it's typical to use a partition table.
 
The floppies I used did have partitions, they also had a bootsector because you were supposed to boot from them ;)

(am I showing my age now? 🤓 )
 
It was fairly unusual, but if you primarily used UFS on them, I wouldn't be surprised if you put an MBR on it either.

The FAT file system (quite like a lot of file systems, really) does reserve a sector at the beginning specifically so boot sectors could be written to it.
 
The AppleII I first used had a boot from floppy start.

When they got a newer one I picked it up, set it up and had to show them how to boot it up by flipping the floppy during the boot process.

Because I was the only one who had RTFM.
 
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