Installation guide

Chapter 4.

Diskettes and CD-ROMs

Using diskettes and CD-ROMs with Red Hat Linux requires some understanding about removable me-

dia. This chapter discusses how to read and write ﬁles to and from diskettes, how to format diskettes,

and how to read and copy data from a CD-ROM. This chapter also covers using CD-writable and

CD-rewritable drives.

4.1. Using Diskettes

Diskettes are one of the oldest removable media solutions available for the personal computer (PC).

Diskettes are ideal as a portable storage solution used for ﬁles that need to be physically moved

around. For example, if two PCs are not on the same network, diskettes are a great solution to transfer

ﬁles from one computer to the other.

4.1.1. Mounting and Unmounting a Diskette

A diskette must be mounted ﬁrst before it can be used. Insert a diskette into the diskette drive and type

mount /mnt/floppy/ at a shell prompt.

The diskette drive activity light should blink as the diskette’s ﬁle system is mounted to the

/mnt/floppy directory.

You can access the contents of the diskette by changing into that directory with the cd

/mnt/floppy/ command.

Alternatively, you can also mount a diskette in the GNOME desktop environment by right-clicking on

the desktop and choosing Disks => Floppy. This mounts the diskette and adds a desktop icon

which you can double-click to explore the diskette contents in Nautilus.

Now that the diskette has been mounted it is available to be copied from or written to. You can open,

save, and copy ﬁles to/from it as you would normally do to your hard drive. You can even explore the

diskette’s contents in Nautilus or Konqueror, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1. Viewing ﬁles on a Diskette with Nautilus