strange hex dump of floppy

Berhanie · 02-05-2004, 12:05 AM

I was fooling around with xxd, trying to look into my unmounted
floppy (which is /dev/sda). I don't understand why I'm getting
different outputs:

# xxd /dev/sda | tail -1
001bff0: 6a65 3465 7973 5972 794b 5949 3854 6e61 je4eysYryKYI8Tna
# xxd /dev/sda | tail -1
001fff0: 5849 4d73 716c 4655 6465 6570 2f4b 7337 XIMsqlFUdeep/Ks7

Besides that, based on the above it looks like the size of my floppy
disk is smaller than the advertised 1.44 MB.

I would be grateful for an explanation.

maillion · 02-05-2004, 05:09 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Berhanie
I was fooling around with xxd, trying to look into my unmounted
floppy (which is /dev/sda). I don't understand why I'm getting
different outputs:

# xxd /dev/sda | tail -1
001bff0: 6a65 3465 7973 5972 794b 5949 3854 6e61 je4eysYryKYI8Tna
# xxd /dev/sda | tail -1
001fff0: 5849 4d73 716c 4655 6465 6570 2f4b 7337 XIMsqlFUdeep/Ks7

Besides that, based on the above it looks like the size of my floppy
disk is smaller than the advertised 1.44 MB.

I would be grateful for an explanation.

I have no idea what the program output means, probably data on the disk, but I can tell you that if the disk capacity, is smaller than 1.44MB, it is because of M$, whose format creates some sort of 'image' to allow for "deformatting" a disk. This image allows only 1.38 MB...

Berhanie · 02-07-2004, 11:53 AM

Thanks for the reply, maillion. If I did my math right, i looks like it's reporting a floppy size of around 1/8 MB. Don't know what's going
on there.