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After days of making the floppy equivalent of "coasters", I got it figured out. And of course, to document my progress, I wrote down each step. When you do that, you're basically writing a shell script, so... I wrote a shell script.

I start by verifying the user is "root".

I then unmount everything. It shouldn't be mounted, but during development, I was always crashing and leaving things mounted. I use the "sync;sync" command to flush all buffers to the disks before unmounting. Actually, the "umount" command does that, so using sync twice and following with umount is stupid. Specially on a floppy I'm about to overwrite anyway.

The "2>" is a trick I learned in NT-DOS to redirect error messages. "1>" is standard out, while "2>" is standard error. I was pleased to see that the same syntax works in Linux. You never know 'till you try.