Multia floppy problems (was Re: Milo/Multia/Keyboard problems)

Eric Smith (eric@goonsquad.spies.com)
Tue, 19 Dec 95 12:06 PST


> With reference to keyboard problems and Multia. I've built
> a multia Milo that initialises the keyboard; normally it

Thanks, I'll try it tonight.

Last night I discovered that my keyboard works OK occasionally, about one time
in ten. I was able to get the root filesystem loaded into the ramdisk, use
fdisk and mke2fs to set up my disk partition, and copy the kernel. When I
tried to install the BLADE 0.3 "b" series disks, I noticed several kinds of floppy
errors:

floppy0: Drive is write protected
end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 2
(or sectors 10 or 12)

I assume that this is happening in unmount, although a few times it seemed to
happen partway through reading a disk.

I was also getting this at seemingly random times:

floppy0: timeout handler died: do fd request

About halfway through the 11th disk, the floppy light went off and the machine
hung. I waited a few minutes thinking that it might be done reading the
floppy and in the process of extracting files, but there didn't seem to be any
sign of hard disk activity. I hit control-C, got a shell prompt, and an "ls -l"
showed that it had copied all of b1-b10 to my disk but only about a third of
b11.

I tried to unmount the floppy, and got an error message which I forgot to write
down, and the machine hung completely.

After about a dozen attempts to reboot with keyboard problems, I finally got
the disk set up again from scratch and tried once more to install the b series
disks. This time it only made it through disk 5 before dying.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Eric