Re: Disused Floppy Drive Needs Head Exercise.

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

On 11/6/2012 9:51 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	Is there any utility that will move the heads on a
> floppy drive from one stop to the other? I needed to write a
> floppy on an old system and discovered that the drive's head
> moving hardware has gotten stiff with disuse. It gets better the
> more I do something like dd if=/dev/fd0 of=somefile, but a
> better thing would be to make the head seek to the outer-most
> track, then the inner-most track and back again until things
> limber up.

Look at the 'skip' option in 'man dd'.  That should do what you desire.
 Loop it 100 times, with a bash script something like:

#!/bin/bash
count=0
while [ $count -le 100 ]; do
   dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/null count=1 skip=1
   dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/null count=1 skip=2940
   let count=count+1
done


That should seek from the 2nd block to nearly the last block of a 1.44MB
floppy drive ~100 times.  I didn't test this but it should work.  Might
need minor modification.

-- 
Stan