hmmm... I've been trying to play with GRUB on my 2.4.2-pre4 system.  For
safety's sake, I wanted to make a bookdisk with mkbootdisk.  After
reading this, I see now why mkbootdisk was locking in the D state with
the loop mounted... Would this also explain not being able to seek
forward while writing a floppy?  

I was trying to make the GRUB boot disk by writing the stage 1 and 2
loaders to the floppy (as per the GRUB docs) with dd:

[root@bubba grub]# dd of=/dev/fd0 if=stage1 bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
[root@bubba grub]# dd of=/dev/fd0 if=stage2 bs=512 seek=1
dd: advancing past 1 blocks in output file `/dev/fd0': Permission denied

With 2.4.1, I get a different error message, but, AFAICT, the same
result.

pete


Alan Cox writes:
> > # mount -t ext2 -o loop /spare/i486-linuxaout.img /spare/mnt
> > loop: enabling 8 loop devices
> 
> Loop does not currently work in 2.4. It might partly work by luck
> but thats it.  This will change as and when the new loop patches go
> in. Until then if you need loop use 2.2