CHARLES ANGELICH wrote in a message to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE:

 CA> Well ... I was doing well when installing a 'mini-Linux'
 CA> install on one of my machines and decided to save some
 CA> configuration info to a floppy. This is from a command line
 CA> (CLI) only Linux install. 

 CA> I opened the floppy, wrote the files and read them back again.
 CA> Everything looked good. I rebooted the machine and found the floppy
 CA> was unreadable, totally scrambled. I had forgotten to _close_ the
 CA> floppy access before quitting Linux. 

 CA> That experience has made me 'edgey' when accessing my working W2K
 CA> hard drive setup from _any_ version of Linux. :-)

That sort of hassle can be avoided by using mtools.  I only deal with
floppies in msdos format,  the ext2 (and similar) formats aren't that
efficient for floppies anyhow.

 CA> I have a 233mhz machine not being used at present that I want to
 CA> use for Linux _only_ and avoid the threat that anything might 
 CA> scramble the hard drive on me. :-)

There ya go.  How much ram does it have?  That will be the most significant
factor in determining performance,  I think.

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