On Wed, 05 Aug 1998, Bob Liesenfeld wrote:
>>
>> Hi gang,
>> I have noticed that when I format a floppy under DOS, I never seem to have
>> any trouble reading, writting and so forth, to them. However, when I format
>> a floppy when running Linux, I frequently find that the mount command fails.
>> have found this to be the case with both ext2 as well as MSDOS filesystem
>> types. Also, I find that if I specify a format *and* a check of the
>> filesystem, the check frequently fails. It would seem that Linux is much
>> fussier about the disk? I can take the same disks, and the same drive under
>> DOS and no troubles. Whats up?
As far as the formatting goes I've had the same problem. I solved it by
switching from fdformat to superformat. Superformat came with my Slackware 3.1
distribution. If you have it I think you'll find it's an improvement, both in
formatting and error checking. It also automatically creates a DOS filesystem on
the disk, and can be used to format to capacities greater that 1440.
I don't know why some people have problems with fdformat while apparently most
others do not. I would guess a hardware conflict, either with the controller or
the drive itself. Is your floppy of older vintage? I recently bought a new
floppy drive, but I've never re-tested fdformat with it, as superformat works
great and is so much more versatile.
As far as the mount problem goes, I've never had that trouble. If fdformat
failed to correctly format the disk however, mount would probably fail, due to
IO errors or wrong file system type. I like the "supermount" kernel patch which
allows for "transparent" mounting of floppies and cd-roms. If you try to mount
a floppy or CD at boot, and you have a wrong file system type (i.e., you're
mounting an MS-DOS filesystem, but you have a LILO boot disk in the drive)
normal mount commands will fail. The same thing will happen if you leave
an audio CD in the drive and then try to mount it. With supermount, if an
inappropriate filesystem is encountered it's simply ignored.
The lsm entries for supermount and superformat are included below.
Things are simpler in MS-Whatever, but you get that simplicity at the cost of
choice. I can't wait til the day when the reality of their diminishing market
share forces MS to start paying attention to the filesystems of other OS.
Begin3
Title: Supermount
Version: 0.6
Entered-date: 27NOV97
Description: Transparent kernel support for removable media. Version
0.6 works on linux-2.0.32. Tested with msdos, vfat, ext2fs
and iso9660 filesystems, and on floppy and cdrom media.
Keywords: mount, filesystem, cdrom, floppy
Author: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Stephen C. Tweedie)
Primary-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/linux/patches/diskdrives
24445 supermount-0.6.diff.gz
6522 supermount-0.6.README
Alternate-site: linux.dcs.ed.ac.uk /pub/linux/supermount
24445 supermount-0.6.diff.gz
6522 supermount-0.6.README
Copying-policy: GPL
End
Begin3
Title: fdutils - Floppy utilities
Version: 4.3
Entered-date: 12MAY96
Description: This package contains utilities for configuring and
debugging the Linux floppy driver, for formatting
extra capacity disks (up to 1992K on a high density
disk), for sending raw commands to the floppy
controller, for automatic floppy disk mounting and
unmounting, etc
Keywords: floppy 2m xdf superformat floppycontrol fdrawcmd
Author: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Maintained-by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Primary-site: ftp.imag.fr /pub/Linux/ZLIBC/fdutils/
87kB fdutils-4.3.src.tar.gz
Alternate-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/system/Misc
tsx-11.mit.edu /pub/linux/sources/sbin
Platforms: Linux 1.3.43 or later (but most features already work
with 1.2.0 or later)
Copying-policy: GNU General Public License, v.2 or later
End
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- Mitch Marantz - -
