Hi,
After wrestling with by computer's BIOS, I finally got my Imation
Superdisk (LS-120) working on Mandrake Linux 6.1. The only problem is,
there seems to be no way to low-level format a standard floppy disk on
it. fdformat only works on drives connected to floppy controllers. I was
amazed that Linux doesn't yet have full support for ide floppies, even
though many distros (including Mandrake) claim to.
I took a look at the Linux kernel mailing list archives. There was some
discussion about this dilemma in December 1998. A patch was even
submitted that added the necessary ioctls. But it never made it into the
kernel. Perhaps it wasn't important a year ago. But recently, some PC
manufacturers have started selling laptops with LS-120s as their only
floppy. These people have no way to format floppies under Linux!
I realize that this isn't a purely Mandrake issue, but since many
distros provide drivers that aren't in the standard kernel, I thought
the Mandrake developers might be interested in this one.
I downloaded the kernel patches, if anyone wants to take a look at them.
Thanks,
Andrew
PS. On a related note, why do all of the GUI disk formatting programs
for Linux only work with floppies? Hmmm...
