🚀 go-pugleaf

[A bunch of people complaining about how slow the DOS
floppy access is under various unices.]

I don't use a NeXT and have never tried to do any DOS file
manipulation with one.  I do use a 386 running SVR4.
DOS access of the floppy drive is incredibly slow as well.
However, I know why and perhaps can help anyone
else trying to do the same on their machines.

Under SVR4, the various ``dosdir'',``doscp'', and
other dos* utilities read and write the floppy in
512 byte chunks.  Each DOS sector is 512 bytes, so
this would seem like a logical way to do it.  But
it is very slow.  By using dd with large buffer sizes
I've been able to get very fast floppy access.

For example:

	dd bs=1474560 if=/dev/rdsk/f0 of=/tmp/dos_disk

Copies the entire 1.44 floppy disk to a file in /tmp
in less than a minute.  If the DOS utilities in NeXTOS
can be told to treat a file as a DOS disk, then feeding
them ``/tmp/dos_disk'' will make them much faster.
Of course when you are done working with the disk, you'll
need to put it physically back on the floppy disk with
a command like:

	dd bs=1474560 if=/tmp/dos_disk of=/dev/rdsk/f0

Which will put it back on the floppy.

Now, I'm pretty sure that ``/dev/rdsk/f0'' does not correspond
to the floppy disk on a NeXT.  I don't know what the proper
device filename is, but with a little looking you should be able
to figure it out yourself.

I also expect that this method will work on any unix machine
that has slow DOS access.

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``written by a drunken insane pathological liar''        guru@stasi.bradley.edu