misc/65843: poor handling of write protected floppy.

[Gregory Bond]

The following reply was made to PR misc/65843; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Gregory Bond <gnb at itga.com.au>
To: Andrew Grillet <andrew at grillet.co.uk>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: misc/65843: poor handling of write protected floppy. 
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 09:38:37 +1000

 This is a limitation of the hardware.  There is no way to discover that a
 floppy is write-protected until you try to write to it.  And no way to notice
 that a floppy has been inserted/removed. 
 
 Recovering from failed disk writes is also known to be unpleasant, but is very 
 hard to fix due to the kernel layering.  It's been talked about for years but 
 no-one has come up with a good solution or the time/inclination/money to do 
 the work.
 
 Short answer: Don't do that.