floppy drive problem

[William Palfreman]

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On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Malcolm Kay wrote:

> Notice all Chris's commands address a ufs partition, and the errors come from
> fd0c -- again a ufs concept. The disk is not set up with ufs but FAT12 so
> these do not exist.
>
> His drive works OK under windows; it is possible but very unlikely there is
> a hardware problem.
>
> His problem will probably disappear if he uses a suitable device fd0 or
> fd0.1440 rather than fd0a.

I tried mounting an old msdos format disk using fd0, fd0a, fd0b, fd0d,
fd0f, fd0h, and they were all exactly the same and all worked - not
entirely surprising given that they all have the same major and minor
numbers.

> This also applies in writing an image using dd, but here it might be
> advisable to use the sized device fd0.1440 or the traditional raw device
> rfd0.1440

I thought rfd[0-1]* was deprecated?  Anyway, it has identical
major/minor numbers to fd[0-1]* and it works identically for me too.

I suppose you could try using fd0.1440.  I'm fairly sure it is simply
the default fd0 does anyway.  It certainly works identically for me,
although the major/minor is different.

In general, I think it is a really big mistake not to assume hardware
failures with an elderly floppy drive, before digger around for an
obscure incompatibility.  The 3.5" IBM floppy has been around a very long
time and are very well understood.  Unless it is a very special type of
hardware.

Chris has since said that the drive takes known good disks, and after
failing to read them, those disks are no longer readable.  There is
probably a huge chink of crud on the read/write heads, and its wrecking
everything that get near it.  That or similar seems to me to be the
overwhelmingly likely cause of the problem.

- -- 
W. Palfreman. 			I'm looking for a job. Read my CV at:
Tel: 0771 355 0354		www.palfreman.com/william/cv-wfp2.html
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