In article <C9H9J6.u2@barclays.co.uk>, harrisd@clacton.barclays.co.uk (David Harrison) writes:
|> In article <5355@wegy.waldorf-gmbh.de>, andy@resi.waldorf-gmbh.de (Andreas Busse) writes:
|> |> 1) What you call A: is /dev/fd0, B: is /dev/fd1.
|> |> 2) Disks have to be formatted:
|> |> fdformat /dev/fd0H1440 (for a 3.5" HD Drive) will do the job (must be root)
|> |> 3) If you want to have msdos-formatted disk, type
|> |> mformat a: (or b:)
|> |> 4) If you want to have a Minix filesystem on these disks, type
|> |> mkfs /dev/fd0 (or /dev/fd1) <number of blocks>,
|> |> where number of blocks is 1440 for 3.5" HD.
|> |> 5) If you want to tar to or from the floppy, type
|> |> tar xvf /dev/fd0 or tar cvf /dev/fd0 <files>
|> |>
|> |> 6) If still something's going wrong, just pull out the floppy. The error
|> |> messages will stop after a while !
|> |>
|> |> Everything clear ?
|>
|> Not so darn *fast* Andy :-)
Sorry. Next time I'll try to explain more slowly. :-)
|>
|> I've got two machines running Linux 0.99pl9 from SLS 1.02. One, a no-name VESA
|> 486DX33 never has problems with the floppy. But the other, a Compaq Contura
|> 3/25, often gets in a twist with the floppy drive. Hmmmmmm, maybe there's a
|> lesson in that :-)
|>
|> As Joel says, on accasion (but not always) when I try to cpio (or tar) from (or
|> to) the floppy I get the dreaded 'reset-floppy called' message and the whole
|> machine jumps about like it's going to blow up (slight exageration there ;-).
|>
|> The only way to shut the damm thing up is to switch it off :-( Your claim that
|> ejecting the floppy cures the problem is, unfortunatly, incorrect in my case.
|>
|> So, questions remain:
|>
|> What causes this to happen?
|> Why can't the faulty process be interupted?
|>
|> Actualy I think I may know the answer to the second one - could be that I have
|> the console device linked to /dev/tty0 so the error messages appear on all
|> vc's which makes it a bitch to log in again and type in a ps/kill sequence.
|>
|> BTW. The floppies in question were formated on a variety of UNIX's: AIX,
|> Interactive & Xenix in particular.
|>
|> -- David
If those error message won't stop after pulling out the disk you might have to kill
the process still trying or reading from the devide. Perhaps a ^C will work, but
probably you'll have to do a #ps -ax to see what's going on.
One problem might be the different floppy drives. Although this isn't a very
good solution, you might have to throw out the Compaq drive and buy a new
one. I never had trouble with TEAC drives, but SONY drives are *always* calibrated
a bit different.
Andy
