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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Getting the most capacity out of Floppy Disks. Date: 21 Jul 1996 08:53:38 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 48 Message-ID: <4ssr6i$5k8@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4sri1r$t7o@tofu.alt.net> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E eyager@novagate.com wrote: > When I formated at 1.44M floppy disk and created a new files system on > it, I only got a capacity of around 860K. That means that almost half > of the disk is wasted to store file system information! How can I > tweak the filesystem parameters so that I can increase the capacity to > a more rational level without having to sacrifice long file names or > random access to files? Why do you wanna sacrifice that? Either, you can pick something like tar(1), and write directly to the floppy. This avoids the filesystem, and gives a fairly generic data exchange medium for almost all Unices. If you need a filesystem floppy, you're suffering from an idiosyncrasy of Unix filesystems that they cannot dynamically convert between inode (administrative) and data space. Thus, you have to allocate inode space at time of filesystem creation. In your case, you've simply been wasting way too much space there. Have a look at the output of df -i to see the inode space. Here's the comment from /etc/disktab about floppies: # To make a filesystem on a floppy: # fdformat [-f <size>] fd<drive>[.<size>] # disklabel -B -r -w fd<drive>[.<size>] fd<size> # newfs <opts> fd<drive>[.<size>] # # with <opts>: # -t 2 - two heads # -u 9|15|18 - sectors per track # (using the default value of 1/4096 is not much useful for floppies) # -l 1 - interleave 1 (for most floppies) # -i 65536 - bytes of data per i-node # (the default -i value will render you with a floppy wasting way # too much space in i-node areas) # Instead of -t 2 -u 18, you can also use -t 0 -u 0 to force newfs picking the values from the disklabel. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)