Re: Floppy issues
Hi Gregor,
On Sat, 2025-10-25 at 01:19 +0200, Gregor Riepl wrote:
> 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.
I suggest verifying whether this problem also occurs with the last release of Debian Wheezy for SPARC.
If it doesn't, then you should create an issue in the sparclinux issue tracker, so that we're aware of it.
See: https://github.com/sparclinux/issues/
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer
`. `' Physicist
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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