Fdutils

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fdutils@fdutils.linux.lu

November 2009

2 participants
2 discussions

Cannot format floppies under kernel 2.6.*?
by ael 21 Jan '10

21 Jan '10

Running linux with kernel 2.6.3* (2.6.32-rc6, for example) on a couple of i386 boxes and an amd64 box, I cannot format floppies or do any low level operations like dd direct to /dev/fd0. I can read and write to floppies already containing file systems. This is on debian testing, although I doubt if that is relevant. I can format floppies under a 2.4.* kernel on an old i386 running an ancient redhat release. I have found no similar reports of such problems, but perhaps not many people still use floppies. fdformat (I realize that is not part of fdutils), gfloppy (ditto) and superformat all fail. (Once gfloppy seemed to have succeeded, but I was not able to replicate that success.) CRC errors are logged to /var/log/messages. More details including strace on superformat are here:- http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=548434 Can anyone help or suggest how to investigate further? Can people here format floppies under 2.6.3* kernels? Thanks in advance for any help, ael

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Setfdprm option to read all of one side, then all of another? (ie "tracks before heads")
by Murray Colpman 03 Dec '09

03 Dec '09

Hello all! I'm looking for easier ways of mounting floppies directly from old computers - setfdprm is great for most of them, but it does not seem to offer an option to read the entire of one side of a disk, then the entire of the other side, rather than its current behaviour, read one track from the first side, then one track from the second side, etc. This is useful for the ADFS 'L' format as used on the later Acorn BBC Micros, as detailed here: http://www.adsb.co.uk/bbc/linux/ Is it possible that such an option may be added in the future? Or does the problem lie in kernel behaviour? If the latter, who should I contact to request a feature there? Thanks! Muzer.

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