Problem with ext2 floppies

[Philippe Andersson <philippe_andersson@ste.scitex.com>]

Hello all,

I began working a lot with ext2fs formatted floppies those last times
(moving around sources for a project I'm working on), and it already
happend twice that a recently formatted floppy died on me when writing
to it on a different machine than the one that created it.

To be more specific, those ext2 floppies were created according to the -
I think - standard technique: "fdformat -n /dev/..." then "mkfs -t ext2
-c -m 0 /dev/...". They seem to have a normal life expectancy as long as
I use them always on the same linux box. But I got a laptop a while ago
that I linuxified, and I started having problems accessing ext2fs
floppies on it (floppies that were coming from another box, meaning -
the ones I format locally are ok, but can't be read anywhere else). I
thought the hardware was to blame (controller or drive - machine is a
Toshiba T2130CS), changed it, but problem stayed. Then I though that the
Toshiba might have a non-standard floppy controller. Fun thing is, I
never had problems accessing non-ext2 floppies (DOS) on it - but then
again, I don't use them that often under Linux (and I hardly write to
them).

Here is a copy of the error message I might get on the laptop:
---------------------<cut>---------------------------------------------
vger:~/scripts# mount /mnt/floppy
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 3 EXT2-fs: unable to read
superblock
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/fd0,
       or too many mounted file systems
---------------------<cut>---------------------------------------------

But now, this problem doesn't seem to be limited to the Toshiba any
longer. An ext2 floppy I just created at work could be read with no
problem at home, but I killed it when writing to it. Linux versions are
2.0.29-libc5, 2.0.30-libc5 and 2.0.32-libc6. Hardware is Compaq, Toshiba
or "no-brand".

Anybody care to comment ? Anything obvious I missed out ?

Thanks in advance for any advice (or shared experience).

Ph. A.

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