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Re: d-i oldworld mac: floppies fail on 4400/200 and 7200/75



Malte,

Errors like that are usually symptomatic of a dirty/dusty floppy drive.

In particular, if the boot floppy is ejected, it means that the firmware got an error trying to read it, or couldn't find the magic numbers in the magic places that it was expecting from a real-live Macintosh boot floppy.

Buy and use a floppy drive cleaning kit (a bottle of isopropanol and a floppy-like thing with a non-abrasive fibrous disk in place of the usual shiny oxide coated disk). Don't be afraid to use it couple of times if you continue to have problems after the first cleaning. You shouldn't need more than two or three cleanings, though.

You should clean *both* the drive you will be writing the disk on, and the one you will be reading it on.

Also, buy a box of new floppies. Don't use floppys that have been sitting around the house for a few years. They accumulate dust over time and the oxide deteriorates.

Finally, when you write the image to disk, always read it back to make sure you have a good copy. If you didn't get a good copy, throw away that floppy disk and use a different one.

Thus:

	dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024
	sync
	cmp /dev/fd0 boot.img

Enjoy!

Rick



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