Floppy drive is going nuts

[Charles Ulrich]

Daniela said:
> Recently, my floppy drive isn't working properly. The kernel often panics on
> unmount of a UFS floppy, and sometimes also while reading or writing an
> ordinary DOS-formatted floppy. Very often, the data is corrupted, but when
> formatting the floppy, it shows no errors. And once I tried to write a file
> (which is just a little bit over 1440k in size) to a 1720k formatted floppy
> (worked properly in the past), and the result was a complete system lockup.
> I had to do a hard reset to bring it back. This is reproducable.
>
> I'm running 4.10-STABLE. How can I tell whether this is a software bug or
> flaky hardware?

Try the following, in this order:

- Reseat the floppy drive cable
- Replace the floppy drive cable
- Replace the floppy drive
- Try a couple of newer/older FreeBSD versions (just the live CD should work
fine) or even a different OS such as Knoppix or (heaven forbid) DOS.

If you still have problems after all this, the most likely explanation is that
some portion of your motherboard went bad.

-- 
Charles Ulrich
System Administrator
Ideal Solution, LLC - http://www.idealso.com