At 05:14 PM 4/26/2004 +0000, isandro belli wrote:
hello ray
I'm calling for some help to resolve a problem and I've got. thanks in advance for any..
I am trying to find a solution to a problem in booting from a floppy (1.68M) for a LEAF Bering 2.4.16 on a Tinkpad 755c(floppy, 486DX100, 75MHz, 2 3com 589d pcmcia)
Reading (among others) through your Oxygen distro docs:
Not mine. David Douthitt was the creator of Oxygen. I'm more of a kibitzer.
-> Chapter 5. Using Floppy Disks
I've found an I/O error message, similar to my own:
-> end_request: I/O error, dev 02:2c (floppy), sector 19 ^
mine is:
-> <snip> -> VFS: Mounted root (minix filesystem). -> Mounting a 6M TMPFS filesystem... -> end_request: I/O error, dev 02:2c (floppy), sector 2 -> MINIx-fs unable to read superblock ^
Context would help. I surmise that this is a boottime message, and boot/init fails at this point.
the same floppy disk does work ok on a Tinkpad 380D, do you think that the:
Does "work ok" mean it boots/inits successfully? Or just that you can mount it and get a directory listing? For troubleshooting purposes, "work ok" needs to have the first of these meanings.
Solution: This is a standard 1.44M floppy being mounted as a 1.68M floppy.
I don't know what this means.
Do you mean that the disk is formatted to 1.44 MB but is being mounted (by what?) at the mount point /dev/fd0u1680 ? (Probably not; I can't recall ever seeing a Bering boot disk that wasn't 1.68 MB.)
Or do you mean that the disk is sold as a 1.44 MB disk, but you've superformatted it to 1.68 MB? (If so, this is nothing special. A boot/init should be fine, and a post-init mount should be to /dev/fd0u1680.)
Or do you mean that you dd'd a 1.68 MB image to a floppy that had been formatted to 1.44 MB. (This is a bad idea. Use superformat to reformat it to 1.68 MB before you dd the image to it.) If you did the Windows equivalent of this, you will need to get advice from someone else, someone who knows Windows better than I do.
Or do you mean something else (what)?
Mount it with the appropriate device file name: mount /dev/fd0u1440 /mnt
would apply here ?
Any thoughts to fix the problem ?
Getting superformatted disks to work with floppy drives is always a bit hit or miss, since none of the drives sold is *officially* able to read above 1.44 MB formatting. In practice most do, just as in practice most floppies themselves can handle the higher densities. If the disk itself fails even with a different floppy drive attached to the same computer, that certainly suggests that the problem is with the floppy controller on the failing laptop ... but I can offer no suggestions for what to do about it. (But even a 486 DX100 is plenty fast for LEAF, so if there is an ISR problem, it reflects poor design of the particular host, not a general problem with older machines.) Look for a list that supports that hardware, I guess.
About all I can suggest is that you try several different floppies. Since *none* of the components involved in the failure -- the disk, the drive, or the controller -- is ever tested with 1.68 MB densities, your hope is that you've run into a problem akin to "tolerance stacking", and that a different disk may perform better. with the 755C's floppy controller.
PS I attached the Tinkpad 380D floppy driver to my 755C, but same error comes out.
I think it might be an floppy drive interface timing problem (too slow interrupt service or something similar)
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