Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> > 
> > Why are floppy drives so fussy?????  
> 
> Cheap drives.  Cheap floppies.  Nobody much cares about
> floppies any more.  Cheap computers these days don't
> even come with floppy drives.  

This one is in a 1992 NEC, expensive computer.  It appears to work 
somewhat better in DOS (where you can copy files to a disk you have 
formatted with the same computer and sometimes read other disks) than in 
linux (where copying a file to it messes up the file structure somehow).
Bad controller?  Why is linux having more problems than DOS?  I was 
writing to disk2 of BL3, that was formatted on the same drive.

I copied resolv.conf, at which point disk2.tgz was only about 1.2MB, so I 
tried to delete it but it was still there.  I finally reformatted in DOS. 
Should I be formatting the disks in linux for use as DOS disks?

Today disk 1 (.img) produced
L 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04.... ILO then booted
Disk 2 complained about I/O on 19 20 21 ..... 30 today but then worked.

I also have a floppy drive on a desktop that keeps telling me there are 
bad sectors on every disk.  Another computer formats them 100%.  Should I 
change the first drive to another?


 > > Even when the drive and medium are good, alignment
> discrepancies can trip you up when you try to read a
> floppy made on a different drive.  When one drive is
> slightly plus and the other slightly minus, they will
> both work fine with perfectly aligned drives -- but
> they won't work with each other.
> 
> At one point, I had a near-perfect floppy drive.  The
> floppies it wrote worked in just about any drive.  But
> then I upgraded my system and the new box didn't have
> room for that floppy.  So I'm using a different floppy
> drive which is much less compatible.  It was that drive
> that caused the image problem on the BL2 floppy.
That means it worked in some other drives but not in ours?
So far the BL3 image (once I managd to download it) worked in three 
computers, two of them consistently.

> 
> > Can I do something to make this one work better with 
> > foreign floppy disks?
> 
> Experiment with all your different floppy drives and
> find the one that works best with all the other drives.
> It is probably the one closest to perfect alignment.


I cannot replace the drive in this laptop, can I?  At least not without 
buying a new one.  Is there some software test for alignment?  Are some 
brands known to work better than others?
  
> > Now I need to go read about how to use cardmgr (in /etc?) 
> > instead of using this external modem.  
> 
> Remove the # from the PCMCIA line in /etc/rc

I got it working without that by typing cd /etc/pcmcia and then start. I
don't see a PCMCIA line in /etc/rc in BL3-floppy.  I see something about
inserting floppy 2 and umounting /fd in rc.  I suppose I could add to rc 
the line
/etc/pcmcia/start
but I don't plan to be using the card every time I boot BL3.
 
> Cheers,
> Steven
> 
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