Re: reading ancient floppy formats

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| From: Allan Swanepoel <allanice001@xxxxxxxxx>

| On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh@xxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
| 
| > On Sun, 2009-09-20 at 10:09 -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

| > > Why was the command dropped?  Would it no longer work?  Is there
| > > another way provided to accomplish the same thing?
| > >
| > > I think SuSE dropped the command too.  Debian and Ubuntu have it in the
| > > fdutils package.
| >
| > I would download the fdutils package from http://fdutils.linux.lu , try
| > to compile and install them, and (if that works) then see what happens.

Jonathan:

Sure, but there must have been a reason for it being dropped.  I also
suspect that when RedHat supported it, they patched it (I haven't
checked).

| technically, if the physical device is in your bios, you should see a
| /dev/floppy device .you should be able to mount this, or just dd it to a
| file
| dd if=/dev/floppy of=img1.img

Allan:

See fd(4).  If you use /dev/fd1, the driver tries to autoconfigure the
interface.  But I doubt that it can do so for oddball things like quad
density and 10 sectors/track.  fd(4) doesn't talk about quad density
but setfdprm(8) does.

I'm trying Fedora Core 3 on the box.  dding from /dev/fd1 gets a lot
of errors.  Here are the first few (from dmesg):
    end_request: I/O error, dev fd1, sector 18
    Buffer I/O error on device fd1, logical block 2
    end_request: I/O error, dev fd1, sector 24
    Buffer I/O error on device fd1, logical block 3
    end_request: I/O error, dev fd1, sector 32
    Buffer I/O error on device fd1, logical block 4
    end_request: I/O error, dev fd1, sector 40
    Buffer I/O error on device fd1, logical block 5

I don't quite know what those mean.  Is sector 18 in logical block 2?
That would seem odd.  Note that these errors are in dmesg and so are
from the kernel, not dd.

I tried a more modest dd:
	dd if=/dev/fd1 of=1 bs=512 count=1
The dd printed the in and out count and yet the drive continued to
make seeking noises (and perhaps recalibrating noises) afterwards for
a couple of seconds.  Odd.  There were no error messages.

The whole block is 0.  I don't know if that is expected (I don't
remember how the machine that wrote it laid down a 7th edition file
system on a floppy).  The machine was a Nabu 1600, not a PC clone (it
predates PC clones).

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