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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

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
> _______________________________________________
> BasLinux mailing list
> BasLinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/baslinux

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