Deron Meranda wrote:
One of the things to be careful of is writing to floppies. Writes are often delayed, being stored in cache first. Now if you properly unmount the floppy before removal the pending writes are flushed to the disk. But you can force this at any time by using the sync(1) command.
Usually when I write a floppy (very rare these days), the write appears to happen very quickly but then an unmount or sync takes a long time as the actual data is flushed out from the cache. So if you just write a floppy and then just eject it from the drive without unmounting or syncing, it's unlikely that the data will actually be on it.
If you go underneath the filesystem layer and directly at the raw device (say with the dd(1) command), you'll bypass this caching.
Yup. I still like to do a sync through; it makes me feel better :-) Paul.
