On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 04:47:05AM -0500, heavytull wrote: > I downloaded the 'seatools for DOS' diskette creator on seagate > website. it's a windows program that creates the diskette; so a > floppy disk must be present in the drive. running the program is > ok, but creating the diskette fails, it says "the current > diskette format not valid". while the diskette is blank, vfat, > mounted and linked to a: in wine; so everything seems to be ok. > > It is same for the win98 DOS program which creates the boot > diskette. It seems wine is not handling dos devices nicely, or > there might be some misconfiguration somewhere. I don't feel like signing up with Seagate's marketing department just to get a copy of this to check it out, so I'll have to try taking a stab at it in the dark :). On the site it sayes that "Seagate for DOS" is a DOS only program and won't work in Windows. But it also sayes that it runs in it's own OS. >From what you've said, I'm guessing that its actually a Windows executable that gets downloaded and when run it will write an image to the floppy disk. You then reboot from that disk and run the tool from the FreeDOS environment that comes up. That all said, the idea of writing a floppy image is the key problem. Having a: symlinked to /media/floppy or wherever else your floppy is mounted doesn't allow for a raw disk image to be written to the floppy. Which is exactly what I suspect this program is attempting to do. It probably has a binary blob that it expects to be able to write directly to the floppy. For that it would need to point to the actually floppy device under /dev, such as /dev/fd0 or /dev/floppy. The problem is that writing to the mount point, only writes on to the filesystem on the floppy, where as the most likely senario here is that it has a floppy image containing a filesystem and files with which it wants to overwrite the current filesystem and contents on the floppy. -- Darragh "Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."
