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Re: superformat:floppy not transferable?



On Wed, 2 Dec 1998, Sebastian Canagaratna wrote:

>    I am using Debian 2 Linux, installed recently. The new version
>    has superformat instead of fdformat. I am able to use superformat
>    to format  floppy disks ( superformat /dev/fd0 ) and use the
>    disks, but I am unable to mount the disk on the machine at home
>    ( or vice versa ). The floppy drive controllers on the two machines
>    are different, I presume. But is this a bug, or do I have to
>    give some parameters when formatting? The floppy disks are 1.44 MB
>    high density, double sided.

This looks remarkably like a problem I see here (part of my job involves
supporting a cople hundred PCs).

The problem is O/S independent. I suspect that you have floppy drives that
are misaligned or have differnt timing or something (I can't tell you
exactly what the problem is - it's not worth putting an oscilliscope on a
AUD$26 floppy drive).

Solution: Just replace one or both drives - you'll have to experimment to
see which one needs replacing (probably the home PC if the lab PC can read
and write floppies to/from other PCs or vice versa).

Regards,

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