Floppy written in CentOS won't mount in FC3

[Paul Howarth]

Deron Meranda wrote:
> One of the things to be careful of is writing to floppies.  Writes are
> often delayed, being stored in cache first.  Now if you properly
> unmount the floppy before removal the pending writes are flushed
> to the disk.  But you can force this at any time by using the
> sync(1) command.

Usually when I write a floppy (very rare these days), the write appears 
to happen very quickly but then an unmount or sync takes a long time as 
the actual data is flushed out from the cache. So if you just write a 
floppy and then just eject it from the drive without unmounting or 
syncing, it's unlikely that the data will actually be on it.

> If you go underneath the filesystem layer and directly at the raw
> device (say with the dd(1) command), you'll bypass this caching.

Yup. I still like to do a sync through; it makes me feel better :-)

Paul.