Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> > software test for alignment?  
> 
> Superformat (Linux) gives you an alignment reading when it 
> formats floppies.  I think it is available in Slackware.
> 

fdutils.tgz
superformat /dev/fd0 dd                 for (720K)
superformat /dev/fd0 hd                 for (1.44M)

fdformat is said to format at normal densities and superformat can also do 
higher densities.  To use superformat I was told in the documentation to 
also run floppymeter which measures time per rotation, data transfer rate, 
and capacity and you fill in the resulting number in a file as instructed.
My number was +250 ppm deviation.  If the deviation is over 150 ppm you 
should not use this drive to do high density formats, so this can be used 
to measure the quality of the drive.  My time per rotation was about 
200,050 instead of 200,000.  I did this with a hd disk and a dd disk.  The 
first gave me +315 the second +250 deviation but the first had at least 
one bad sector which might have skewed results.  They said to use a 
disposable disk.  Does this mean the disk cannot be reformatted and used 
again, or just that data will be lost?

floppymeter --dd   (or hd)

Unlike dos format, superformat won't format disks with bad sectors.  It 
tried twice and gave up.  It wants mformat as well (I think to format 
disks for use with MSDOS?).  The message for my 720 disk (dd) with 
superformat is
mformat -s9 -t80 -h2 -S2 -M512 a:
warning:  mformat error

I don't think these numbers refer to alignment.  

I don't see mformat in the collection of binaries in fdutils.tgz but that
string is somewhere in mtools so I copied that to /usr/bin and tried again
to format the 720 disk.  mformat:  command not found. mformat is also
found in xdftools and the man page for that said I need to set something
in /etc/mtools or ~./mtoolsrc for mformat to work.  This will take some
time to figure out.  'The drive has to be configured to accept the 23x2x80 
geometry'.  They give an example of .mtoolsrc.
One line is A /dev/fd0 0 0 0 0  and the others are a bit hard to figure 
out because it is in man format and I am reading with zless.


After I used the bad-sector 1.44MB disk with floppymeter, I could not
format it with DOS format, which refused to format it, something about
sector 0 I think.  Floppyemeter does something to sector 0. Superformat
attacked it but found a bad sector. Superformat could format the 720 disk
but for linux only (unless I figure out mformat).  The disk can be saved
for use with floppymeter.  It works after superformatting it.

I still don't have a way to test drive alignment but I can run floppymeter
to give some indication of how well the drives work.  


---- 

Unrelated, but we now have a Compaq computer that seems to work okay with
basiclinux but had serious problems yesterday when trying to copy CDs.  
Using Roxio and direct copy (since Win98 will display on our 17" monitor
only at 640 we could not read the whole GUI so could not copy via the hard
drive - does it copy via RAM?  The CD contained more than will fit in RAM)
it crashed at 52% and we had to power off.  Windows would not run.  Now it
won't reinstall and keeps giving assorted gpf errors when we try - SUWIN
caused GPF error in modules VGA.DRV or other modules, at various points
during installation (loading files at - 23% or 98%).

F-PROT, set up to load to RAMdisk, sometimes works now, sometimes not.  
Two DIMMs in there.  Removing one at a time does not help.  What else
would cause intermittent problems at various locations (registers ), the
memory controller?  No problems installing Win98 the first time.  DOS
works fine other than F-prot not always installing itself correctly into
RAMdisk.  DOS does not use much RAM the way we use it but F-Prot probably 
uses 64MB.  

Three installation CDs for other linuxes would not install (with help from
a list member who uses them), two with I/O errors the third with a monitor
error (out of range - it must assume that our monitor will do higher horiz
or vert refresh than it can actually do).  Never had any problems
installing BL2 or BL3 on there and I could choose the refresh rates for X
when the monitor told me it was out of range, or use Xvesa without
problems.  DSL linux ran from the boot CD and copied one CD-ROM with
bashburn but it was supposed to be bootable and we got only the files.  
This computer has the hard drive reset problem, which I fixed in BL2 with
hdparm - it interferes otherwise with reading large files.  Probably the
installation CDs are getting stuck for this reason.  Three cheers for 
basiclinux, which is working where Win98, DSL, Xandros, and SuSE won't 
install.  475MHz 1999 computer.  

This whole mess started because we were trying to copy a CD.  I have now 
found three front-end scripts for cdrecord, two of them needing perl.  Can 
someone steer me to Christof's posting where he reported getting this 
working with loadlin?  I have ide-scsi.o and a scsi kernel if needed.
I think there were other modules also needed.   If we get this machine 
recording CDs we may give up on Win98 (which also won't work with some 
printers on that machine).   It would also be nice to get SANE and 
Realaudio to work in linux, and maybe Abiword.