In my Dell Laptop, I have a 3.5" diskette driver plugin, which
works fine, when I do normal things, but earlier this week I had
a "mystery diskette" to decode, and pull data out.
The diskette in question was written in a "DD" driver, but used
media was of "HD" type. The end result was that its format was
"wrong" for the media, and reading it failed.
A quick transformation of a "HD" diskette into a "DD" type is
explained at site:
http://fdutils.linux.lu/disk-id.html
where there are also many tests to discover things about the diskette data
format. To read the "DD format in HD media" diskette successfully,
"rate=2" parameter was necessary in tests done in that page to determine
various parameters of the diskette.
(That is, a "taped-up-DD" media is formatted into 720 kB capacity, and
then the tape is removed getting a "DD in disguise" media format)
While using that utility with 2.4.20-redhat-rawhide-xyz kernel,
and following the instructions to determine what the data really
is in there, execution of command:
fdrawcmd read 0 1 0 1 2 0 0x1b 0xff length=10240 need_seek track=1 >/dev/null
did cause the floppy driver to yield some kernel error dump, and
any floppy command after that did return EXIO error. Only reboot
restored the driver back to sanity.
A sticky error state is, of course, considerable as a bug in this case.
Is this really worth the effort to fix ? I am not sure.
The Floppy driver (drivers/block/floppy.c) does not appear to have
listed MAINTAINER, but many people have touched on it over the years.
/Matti Aarnio
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Feb 23 2003 - 22:00:33 EST