5.25" floppy drive

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:04:40 +0200, Christoph Kukulies <kuku at kukulies.org> wrote:
>   I'm in the need of reading some data from old 5.25" floppy media (1.2MB).
> I lent 2 drives from neighbour institutes at the university and after 
> having recalled that the
> floppies have to be enabled in the BIOS I'm now seeing the fd0 device in 
> dmesg (FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE).

Similat to this?

	% dmesg | grep ^fd
	fdc0: <floppy drive controller>
		port 0x3f2-0x3f3,0x3f4-0x3f5,0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on acpi0
	fdc0: [FILTER]
	fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0

This is for a 3.5" drive of course, the 5.25"'s message should
read similar. FreeBSD 7 here.



> I can do a dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/root/fd0.dmp
> 
> The select light is lit, the head motor seems to get power but the 
> spindle doesn't spin.
> 
> I tried that with two TEAC drives to no avail.

Strange, I would suspect drive electronics first... do you have
a "low end" PC (DOS) to check the drives? The lowest level diagnosis
tools are often the best. :-)



> Any clues what I may have forgotten? The drive is connected with the 
> edge connector and the end is open.

Sounds correct.



> Does it need to be terminated?

No.

The position on the cable selects which "drive letter" will be
associated to a given drive; the one on the end is A:, the one
on the middle is B:. A single drive is usually connected to the
end of the cable. As the connector for 5.25" drive does have
a gap, you can't "wrongly connect" it. The connector to the
main board should also have a nose that prevents wrong cabling.
Wrong cabling is indicated by a permanent (!) activity light
on the drive.

Instead of using dd, can you maybe access the drive using mount
or the mtools (from ports)?

If you encounter further problems, I can get a working drive
and check here. I'm in a kind of working museum. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...