!SDCreate: more than expected!

I’m not sure if this is of use to anyone…but I have just used !SDCreate to create a new boot disk for Debian GNU/Linux.

One of my servers needed a new OS on it and the DVD drive is broken. Having only access to a Windows computer (work machine which I shouldn’t really use for personal stuff) or faffing about with one of the other GNU/Linux servers I thought I’d see what was available on RISC OS.

Booted OS, downloaded Debian NetInst (took about 20 minutes), inserted USB drive, wrote image using !SDCreate (took about 2 minutes), booted into Debian install environment on my server. Very painless and very useful!

Is this intentional behaviour for !SDCreate or just a happy accident?

Yes, it’s intentional that SDCreate can be used to write arbitrary images. I was mainly thinking about RISC OS images when I wrote SDCreate, but since most disc images are just a LBA-based dump of the data from the disc sectors there’s no special logic involved. Just read the input file and write it to the device using DiscOp calls.

Well I’d just like to say a big “thankyou” for creating this program.

Its another program off the list of things that I do regularly with computers that I can do with RISC OS and thus means I need to spend less time with other OSs!

The more time goes by the less time I spend on other operating systems (except work which is currently stuck on Windows).

I accept that RISC OS is lacking in many ways but for some undefinable reason I find it a much nicer OS to use than anything I have used before (although Haiku comes close but is nowhere near as stable)