*BSD News Article 40696


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From: chilton@MCS.COM (Christopher Hilton)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: [pcemu] anyone got it working?
Date: 11 Jan 1995 10:30:45 -0600
Organization: /usr/lib/news/organi[sz]ation
Lines: 57
Message-ID: <3f113l$jjt@Mars.mcs.com>
References: <JUN.95Jan11130911@fox.fax.iwa.fujixerox.co.jp>
NNTP-Posting-Host: mars.mcs.com

In article <JUN.95Jan11130911@fox.fax.iwa.fujixerox.co.jp>,
Junichi Kurokawa <jun@fox.fax.iwa.fujixerox.co.jp> wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>Has anyone out there got David Hedley's <hedley@cs.bris.ac.uk>
>pcemu1.01alpha working?
>
>I compiled the distribution on my FreeBSD-1.1.5.1, but I can't
>understatnd the following instruction stated in the README.
>
>    > Shove it in your Unix box and type cp /dev/fd0 DriveA This should
>    > create a 720k (or whatever) file which the emulator can boot from.
>

He instructions want you to put a formated DOS boot disk in your first
floppy drive and cp it to an image file so that pcemu can use that
image to boot from.
 
>What the hell is `cp /dev/fd0 foo' supposed to mean, anyway?  /dev/fd0
>is a device file, that you don't cat, less or edit.

Part of the unix file system mantra is that everything can be treated
as a file. This means that you don't need a special command to copy
the entire contents of a disk or tape to a file, cp will do just fine
since there are no devices, only "special files". If you don't believe
this and want to use an esoteric command to make the boot floppy use:

     $ dd if=/dev/fd0 of=DriveA

don't be surprised if it does the same thing as the cp command though.

>
>At that point, the floppy is a bootable MS-DOS disk so it won't mount as
>a filesystem.

He just needs the image of a boot disk so he has a copy of the files
needed to run ms-dog. pcemu can interpret them from either the disk or
the file. It's that unix a-device-is-a-file thing again.

>
>I suspect the instruction given is plain wrong.  Any suggestions?
>

Try them as written or use the dd command I gave you. Though the
wording is a bit more sarcastic then I would use the content is 100%
correct.

C.
-- 
Christopher Sean Hilton	                       E-mail: chilton@mcs.com
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