Re: Floppy access by dd fails for 2.6.26-rc2 to final, possibly even earlier

From: Wakko Warner
Date: Tue Jul 22 2008 - 13:11:10 EST


Gene Heskett wrote:
> I just been advised by private email that I an not the only one who has lost the
> use of his floppy drive via dd. The corresponder noted that he had a copy of
> DSL with a 2.4.something kernel, and his drive worked flawlessly while booted
> to DSL.
>
> So now there are at least 2 floppy users wandering in the wilderness looking for
> water. We need it to support 20 year old computers without a TCP stack or
> network cards.

I guess I'll chime in. I'm not sure this is the same problem or not, but my
Alpha AS1000a (EV56 5/400) has never successfully been able to read the
floppy. I always get garbage. The drive does work as I can use the RCU
from floppy from the Arc BIOS.

Linux sees this device as a 2.88mb floppy. It is a 1.44mb and the
information in the Arc BIOS is set to 1.44mb (I don't think it matters, I
boot from SRM, not sure how to set the floppy there)

I also do not see any errors or other useful messages in the logs.

Jun 1 15:23:06 narf kernel: [4262383.309846] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 2.88M
Jun 1 15:23:06 narf kernel: [4262383.324494] FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306

I tried forcing to use a specific type:
Jun 1 16:21:38 narf kernel: [4194206.301784] floppy0: setting CMOS code to 4
Jun 1 16:21:38 narf kernel: [4194206.301784] Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
Jun 1 16:21:38 narf kernel: [4194206.314479] FDC 0 is a National Semiconductor PC87306

But that failed even worse with errors on sector 0. (NOTE the floppy was
good)

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