Re: Floppy drive problem.
On Sat, 29 May 1999, N. Raghavendra wrote:
> I am a Debian newbie and have the following problem with my
> floppy drives. There are two of them: a 1.44 MB floppy drive
> and an unused 1.2 MB floppy drive. In the BIOS setup I have
> configured the 1.44 MB drive as A: and the other floppy drive as
> B:. But Linux seems to reverse this order: it sees the 1.2 MB
> drive as the first floppy drive (/dev/fd0) and the 1.44 MB one
> as the second floppy drive (/dev/fd1).
>
> One consequence of this is that at the end of installing Debian
> (hamm), I was unable to make a custom boot disk for my system,
> because when the installation program asked me to insert a blank
> floppy, I put a 1.44 MB floppy in the drive, and it said
> something like "Making boot floppy failed. Check that the floppy
> isn't write-protected and is in the correct drive". The same
> thing happened when I tried the mkboot command later on.
> Is there a way of making Linux see my 1.44 MB drive as /dev/fd0
> and the other one as /dev/fd1? I apologize in case this is an
> old question, already answered.
Raghavendra
During bootup and reading the boot sector, it is the BIOS that has
control. Once booted, Linux sees the only hardware, not the BIOS
settings. It appears that the first drive on your floppy cable is
the 1.2 MB drive. If this is the case, the only fix I see is to
open your box and switch the connectors on the two drives.
If this isn't the case, I haven't a clue.
--David
David Teague, dbt@cs.wcu.edu
Debian GNU/Linux Because software support is free, timely,
useful, technically accurate, and friendly.
(Hope this qualifies.)
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