Marc Wilson wrote:
This thread got me to wondering about my own floppies, which I have not checked in some time. I tried to access several floppies, all unsuccessfully. Mount either seems to do nothing, or it makes a lot of noise. In either case it does not mount the drive and it never exits, either. I tried to kill mount (as root) but that didnpt work. Nothing will turn the drive light off short of physically removing the diskette.On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 07:08:53PM -0600, Kent West wrote:sudo fdformat -n /dev/.static/dev/fd0u1440I have to wonder how you came up with that, vs reading the man page for fdformat(8). That tells you to use setfdprm(8) to set the parameters of the generic device before trying to use it. Further, why wouldn't you just use superformat(1)? It usually does a MUCH better job with marginal media than fdformat(8) does, and it'll invoke mformat for you when it's done.
I did try to use superformat. It seemed to do the low level format OK, but then it got to running mformat and the drive just made a whole lot of noise and eventually gave me the following error:
$ superformat /dev/fd0 Formatting cylinder 79, head 1 mformat -s18 -t80 -h2 -S2 -M512 a: plain_io: Input/output error mformat: Error reading from '/dev/fd0', wrong parameters? warning: mformat error Verifying cylinder 0, head 0 read: Input/output error remaining -1It occurs to me that, since I recently installed a new MB, that the controller has changed and possibly the drive as well) since I last tried to use the drive. Superformat would still be using the previous deviation, but where is that stored. I checked the man pages for superformat and fdutils. They say /usr/local/etc/fddriveprm, but this does not exist. Is there some way to force superformat to check the drive and controller again to get the correct deviation for the current drive and controller?
-- Marc Shapiro No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. What?! Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here. Boom. Sooner or later ... boom! - Susan Ivanova: B5 - Grail