Re: floppy woes

[Lindsay Allen <allen@cleo.murdoch.edu.au>]

On Fri, 15 May 1998, E.L. Meijer (Eric) wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am having problems with a floppy drive.  Basicly it won't write
> properly on any floppy disk that hasn't been formatted in that drive.
> Preformatted floppies screw up.  The problem is, that often after a
> failed attempt to read or write from the drive, the only way to be able
> to use the floppy drive again is to reboot.  I have tried fdflush on
> it, but this didn't seem to work.  I have tried unloading and reloading
> the floppy.o kernel module, to no avail.  If I try to mount a (`good')
> floppy after such an event, I get messages like `device busy' or
> `/dev/fd0: no such address'.

The head of the floppy drive can get offset either to left or right of its
correct position. This means that it can read disks written by itself but
might have trouble reading disks created by other drives (unless they have
a similar error.) If you have two floppy drives the errors might cancel
(if you are lucky)  or they might add, in which case neither drive might
read the other's disks. 

In the days when 5 1/4" drives were $200+, special (audio?) disks were
available which could be used with the aid of a CRO to re-align the
head. Now it is cheaper to buy a new drive. 

> 
> Question: is there a way to hard-reset the floppy drive and driver
> under linux, without rebooting?

I just take the disk out.

> Another annoying point is that if something goes wrong while reading or
> writing to floppy, the system goes on trying forever and a day,
> regardles of whatever kill signals are being sent.  Would there be a
> way to make it give up after, say, 10 attempts?
> 
> Any comments appreciated,

Lindsay

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Lindsay Allen   <allen@cleo.murdoch.edu.au>  Perth, Western Australia
voice +61 8 9316 2486    32.0125S 115.8445E    vk6lj      Debian Unix
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