[Novalug] How the blazes do I write to a floppy?

[Beartooth]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Clif Flynt wrote:
>
>  A lot of floppy media and drives that are officially 80 track 
> will actually work at 82 or 84 tracks.  You can also get more 
> data onto a floppy disk with variations in the standard floppy 
> formatting (for instance, one sector, instead of 8 (or was it 
> 16) per track).  This gets rid of the losses for inter-sector 
> gaps.
>
>  I think I got the 1.47 boots onto my floppies by su-ing to 
> root and
>
> dd if=some.file.img of=/dev/fd0

 	Bless you, SIR! That just worked, on the old machine, 
with the DSL plain boot floppy; I'll try it in a minute with the 
GRUB one.

 	This is particularly welcome because, last night, I 
*thought* I had managed to install Puppy 2.14R -- until I removed 
floppy and CD, and it wouldn't boot. (Maybe if I give it just the 
Puppy boot floppy ...?)

 	The new machine with the external USB floppy drive still 
won't let me write to one, even with dd! I get, for instance, :

[root at topblack btth]# dd if=DSLbootfloppy-grub.img of=/dev/fd0
dd: opening `/dev/fd0': Read-only file system
[root at topblack btth]# gfloppy
[root at topblack btth]#

 	[The gfloppy command did nothing, afaict -- even though 
man gfloppy tells me I need mtools, and yum tells me :

Package mtools - 3.9.11-2.fc8.i386 is already installed

-- 
Beartooth Implacable, Neo-Redneck Linux Evangelist
Freedom is my issue : I'm pro-choice, pro-right-to-die,
pro-gun, and pro-term-limits. Without defiance, no liberty.