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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] mounting 360K floppy as fd1 in BL2
  • Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 04:24:17 +0000 (UTC)

I did some more reading. Apparently whoever was mounting their 360K drive was mounting it as B: (fd1) because they used minor number 5 and I found an official looking table where /dev/fd?d360 has major number 2 and minor number 4. Nothing had numbers 5 6 or 7. So I am guessing 5 is the correct number for /fd1 and you can use 6 and 7 for fd2 and fd3. Antoher site implied that fd3 and fd4 would need to be external drives.

Anyway, on a different computer, this time with BL3 instead of BL2, I typed
mknod /dev/fd1d360 c 2 5

I could then type
mount /dev/fd1 /mnt and it would tell me there was no ext2 filesystem but mount the drive. Or I could type
mount -t msdos /dev/fd1
and it would mount wihtout comments.
Another website implied you could try mount /dev/fd1d360 /mnt but that just gave me error messages.

I finally found a site where someone was unable to mount their floppy disk because linux is fussier than DOS about having a perfect disk. They got the same I/O and sector 0 messages that I got. So this appears to be my problem with BL2 and one disk.

Nobody else had to use mknod to make the device first. Perhaps Steven, in a future version of BL, could include fd0 and fd1 versions of 5.25" drives (360 and 1200).


Several people had written several mailing lists apologizing for their need to read old 360K floppy disks in linux. SOmeone suggested they copy the data ASAP before the disk fell apart. In my experience I have only lost 3 such disks in 20 years, as opposed to at least 2 dozen 720s and many dozen 1.44MB floppy disks going bad because they are built with tracks closer together. So I keep data on the 360s and use the 1.44's only for file transfer.

I will try reformatting the disk on the same floppy drive where I want to read it and see if that helps linux.



On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, sindi keesan wrote:

I read about the minor numbers for double density 360K drives (/dev/fd0d360 and /dev/fd1d360) and the first is 2,5 so I assumed the second is 2,6 (based on the pattern of /dev/fd1* being one greater than /dev/fd0*). mknod fd0d360 c 2 5 and mknod fd1d360 c 2 6 should have worked. I did something similar to make missing SB16 devices with mknod.

But I still cannot mount my 360K floppy drive. not a valid block device.

What do I try next? I notice that BL2 comes with support for a 720K floppy drive as fd0 (a:) but not as fd1 (b:). And no support for anything other than 722 (double density 3.5"?), h1200 (high density 5.25"?), h1440 (high density 3.5"?), u1440 (what is this?), and u1722 (?).

Various websites assumed you had the dev already in /dev. We seem to have a large number of sd's (scsi drives?) listed tho BL kernel does not have scsi support. I would appreciate support in any future BLs for 360K floppy drives as fd0 and fd1. What is an ed? A vcs?

I am going back to DOS to read my 360K disk. The problem did not arise until now because I only write to these disks with WP51/DOS.

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org




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