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Floppy issues



Hi,

This is more out of curiosity, since I currently don't have much use for a floppy drive.

However, I did want to test all the hardware in my Ultra 10 and how well it works with the current Debian release.

When I try to dump the contents of a floppy disk, I get the following error:
$ cat /dev/fd0 >/dev/null
cat: /dev/fd0: No such device or address

dmesg shows something different:
cat: attempt to access beyond end of device
fd0: rw=0, sector=0, nr_sectors = 16 limit=8

There is a (working) floppy disk in the drive, and OBP "test floppy" does its job without error. But Linux doesn't seem to be able to access the device at all. There's zero activity, not from the motor, not from the stepper, not from the LED.
The OBP test makes the LED light up and the head to move around a bit, so the drive is definitely not broken.

I don't know much about the hardware, except that it's a standard PC drive by Mitsumi, and that the floppy controller is attached to the machine's EBUS. OBP lists it as "/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/ebus@1/fdthree", and the only floppy driver loaded in Linux seems to be called "platform:floppy".

If anyone has an idea or seen similar issues, I'd be curious to know more.

Thanks,
Gregor


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