Hello Alain,
there seems to be a severe bug in fdutils-5.4-20020222.
At least for me superformat is not able to format high
capacitiy disks without the --verify_later option.
The original bug report I received is at
http://bugs.debian.org/148587
It seems, that the verify code uses the _old_ drive
parameters (either whatever was autodetected for media
that was in the drive before, set with setfdprm, or the
default) to verify the tracks, which are formatted with
the new parameters.
You can reproduce this as follows:
# insert a disk with the usual 1440/1440 format into the drive
# and make sure that the floppy driver uses this format.
voss@automatix [~] setfdprm /dev/fd0 1440/1440
voss@automatix [~] mdir
Volume in drive A has no label
Volume Serial Number is 682D-7F39
Directory for A:/
No files
1 457 664 bytes free
voss@automatix [~] superformat /dev/fd0 ds hd sect=21
This command results in a lot of I/O errors
and noises like the floppy drive is suffering.
The first few error messages are
Jun 30 14:31:39 automatix kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 60
Jun 30 14:31:40 automatix kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 62
Jun 30 14:31:43 automatix kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 81
Jun 30 14:31:44 automatix kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 82
Jun 30 14:31:46 automatix kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 102
If I try the same with the "--verify_later" option,
everything works fine:
voss@automatix [~] superformat --verify_later /dev/fd0 ds hd sect=21
Formatting cylinder 79, head 1
mformat -s21 -t80 -h2 -S2 -M512 a:
Verifying cylinder 79, head 1
I hope this helps,
Jochen
PS.: if you reply to this mail, please send (via Cc:) a copy to
148587-forwarded(a)bugs.debian.org
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http://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/~wwwstoch/voss/
