Accessing floppy disk in QNX4

Hi, I’m a newbie just handed a short term (same as short fuse) project on a production QNX4 system. Because it is a production machine I can only have the system at a command line prompt for a little while each day, 20 to 30 minutes. I don’t have a lot of time to look up commands and then try them to see which ones work. :frowning:

I have a flat ascii text file already created on the hard drive from the production application. I need to copy the file to a DOS formatted floppy and then to a windows system.

  1. I would like to list the devices (find floppy name)
  2. mount the floppy if needed
  3. copy the file to the floppy
  4. list the files on the floppy to verify that it made it

Oh, and of course we don’t have the QNX manuals from the vendor.

Thanks for any help you can give me. :smiley:
Russ

Here is the commands you will need:

sin: list all the processes that are running)
Fsys.floppy: flopp disk driver
Dosfsys or Fatfsys; DOS filesystem driver (depends on the version of QNX4 you have)
ls: equivalent of dir command
cp: to copy files

First run sin to check if Fsys.floppy is running or not, if not:

Fsys.floppy &

then the floppy device should appear as /dev/fd0:

ls /dev

Now you need to mount the floppy to access on a DOS filesystem

Fatfsys & or Dosfsys &

After a second or two the following device shoudl appear

/dos/a

Then you can copy file and read the content of the disk:

cp file.txt /dos/a/file.txt

and check the content of the disk with

ls /dos/a

You can have an idea of all the available commands by doing ls /bin and ls /usr/bin. For each command you can get a summary of the help by doing “use ls” for example.

Good luck.