CompuServe Messages

Dave, As you have found, using FFS floppies is relatively easy now that the filesystem is in ROM. Historically, until the 2.0x release of the operating system, only the OFS existed in ROM, which meant that a fastfilesystem-formatted floppy disk could never be bootable. Also, a FFS floppy disk would generally not be a good idea to use for a disk that is to be widely distributed, as a number of folks have not upgraded to 2.0x. In addition, the OFS diskettes do offer one additional advantage – reliability/recoverability. The old filesystem was designed with a number of redundant control structures which allowed better detection of errors and better capabilities of reconstruction of files in the event of errors. Since floppies are known to go "bad" on their own more frequently than hard disks, some folks feel that the additional "security" is worth the extra 40K of overhead (and slight reduction in performance). hope this helps…. – BobR