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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Configure Linux to read your PC floppy disks By Mary Ann Richardson, TechRepublic November 21, 2002 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/soa/Configure-Linux-to-read-your-PC-floppy-disks/0,139023731,120270100,00.htm
Reconfiguring a Linux floppy drive as a DOS floppy drive makes it easy to transfer files in a nonnetworked Windows/Linux environment. Find out how Linuxconf makes this possible. 
Although most of the corporate PCs you'll support are networked, there are still small or home offices that lack such connectivity. When this is the case, I have found that the easiest way to transfer one or two files between Windows machines is to copy the files to and from floppy disks. Throw Linux into the mix, however, and this method becomes slightly more complicated.
By default, Linux will not accept PC disks. When you try to mount a PC disk on the Linux floppy drive, you are forced to reformat with Linux's native ext2 filesystem. Once the disk is reformatted, you can use it with Linux but not with Windows. What you need is a way to configure the drive so that both Linux and Windows can read and write to the same disk. The Linuxconf utility lets you do just that.
Configuring a DOS floppy drive with Linuxconf
Starting Linuxconf I work with an earlier version of Red Hat, namely 6.1. To start Linuxconf, I needed to open a terminal window. On later versions, you can access Linuxconf by clicking on the GNOME Main Menu Application button and moving to Linuxconf under the System menu. Users who don't have Linuxconf can download the latest version here. Executing Linuxconf displays the window shown in Figure A. In this window, scroll down to File Systems in the left panel of the window and click on Access Local Drive to display the Local Volume tab shown on the right. Next, click on the drive you want to reconfigure, /dev/fd0, as shown in Figure A. Click on /dev/fd0 to display the Volume Specification tab shown in Figure B. (If the Base tab is not immediately active as shown in Figure B, click the tab to activate it.) The Base tab in Figure B indicates ext2 as the filesystem in the Type field. To reconfigure the drive, replace ext2 with msdos. Click the down arrow to the right of the Type field and then click msdos in the drop-down list. Figure C shows the Type field with the msdos filesystem type selected. Finally, click the Accept button to accept the changes and enable the Linux floppy drive to work with MSDOS-formatted disks.
Working with PC disks in Linux
For example, you can transfer files you create in GIMP to Windows XP and work with them in the Windows Paint program. You can transfer a text file created in Emacs to Windows XP and edit it with Word. Likewise, you can transfer a Word document to Linux and work with it in Emacs; note that before you do, save the Word document as Plain Text so that it can be viewed in Emacs without displaying any hidden text, which may include confidential material or text that you meant to delete.
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