Mastodawn

Not really. The filesystem tools and operations are the usual ones, and indeed the image files that operating systems and whatnot are distributed as can be treated as mountable DASD volumes with md. So it's a simple matter of copying a filesystem tree in the very same way that one would do elsewhere, be that pax -r -w or cp -R -p or pcmanfm or whatever.

Things like the RPi Imager are simply bundling up all of the same stuff behind a GUI (and, for example, using their own code to do mostly the same as what newfs_msdos does). These dedicated tools aren't actually doing anything special, really. They're conveniences.

Indeed, the RPi Imager when built for Linux either simply shells out to run the mount and umount commands directly or palms everything off to UDisks2. On MacOS it's likewise just palming things off to Disk Arbitration.

#TFcards #FreeBSD #RaspberryPi #SDcards

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JdeBP Sep 29

@matt303 @vnvobit @WiteWulf

I've never bothered with special software to write TF cards, myself. I just gpart them and and use dd; or newfs and then mount the volumes directly and use pax/cp to just copy stuff in.

Failure at unmount time, presuming that the software is just trying to do an actual unmount, pending writes having flushed pretty quickly presumably, has the smell of card fault or card reader age/fault about it.

I've had to retire at least one old reader because it couldn't handle HC and XC cards.

#SDcards #TFcards #RaspberryPi

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JdeBP May 29, 2025

Another 4 hours gone. Another 2GiB done.

I might not be doing the card for Orac's key today, after all.

#pax #TFCards #BerkeleyFFS

JdeBP May 28, 2025

For some people, #retrocomputing is running FreeDOS.

But today's retrocomputing experience for me is doing a backup with #pax .

Years ago, one backed up to magnetic tape with tar. That's what it was actually *for*. The 't' stands for "tape" after all.

But the wildly adventurous would, with the tape already blocked, just mount the device as a filesystem and use ordinary filesystem commands. It would be really slow, and seek like mad, as filesystems of the time were still doing things like putting all of the i-nodes into a big table at the start of the volume. But it would work.

One in the eye for those "peecee" users with their toy operating systems that were restricted to "disk drives", with letters. (-:

Mounting a TF card connected over USB and then just doing pax -r -w has echoes of that past. Certainly, the speed compared to the internal DASD, and the fact that sync visibly stops everything in its tracks, helps with giving the old time experience.

#TFCards #Unix #tar

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JdeBP May 28, 2025

The backup of my home directory on one machine to a nice little FFS volume is still going as I write this. It has been going for several hours.

It turns out that I have a lot more in my home directory on that machine than I remembered. (-:

And £30 from #Tesco is pretty much in line with e-Bay prices, and had the advantage that I had it in my hands the day that I decided that I needed it.

I didn't even think about using dump/restore.

pax -r -w -u -v

#TFCards #MicroSD #pax

JdeBP May 28, 2025

Fortunately today, everything was not as it seemed, and the £30 Integral-branded TF card that I bought from Tesco had *not* in fact failed after a mere 3 hours's use.

It turns out that my cheap and cheerful USB1 card reader, bought on a whim at a computer fair years ago, is a bit crap. I suspect that it's on the border, power-demand wise.

I put the card into a different reader, that has its own PSU, and all of the "device not configured" errors stopped.

#USB #TFCards #MicroSD