On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, Chris Lupo wrote: > It seems my floppy drive is as dead as a door. > > I have exactly 1 disk that I can boot from, from my original Deb > install. But, I can't do *anything* else!. > > I can't mount, dd, tar, mkfs, fdformat... Nothing! I don't even have any > messages to give any help. It's truly non-responsive. The process either > times out, or I have to kill it. The drive light doesn't even come on. > > Things I have checked: > I do have a /dev/fd0 device, read and write permissions. > It has power and data cable connection (I can boot that one disk). > I have tried many different disks, which do work in other machines. Did you enable floppy disk support as a module? If so, is it loaded? Does your kernel have support for floppy disk? Is your flopy disk connect as a "standard pc floppy disk" or is it a USB, or Parallel or other type of interface based floppy? Did you recently disconnect any cables inside your machine that run to your floppy drive? Did you do any work inside your computer between the times it was working and now? What is the size and age of your floppy (physical and storage) ? (Related to writing head size, and new vs. old drives and magnetic paths left on disks.) You mention other boot floppies do not work. Were all of these floppies left in a storage spae near a magnetic?Speaker? Larger/high-power CRT or other EMI producing devices? try: # dmesg | less -i and do a search for "fd" in the data. (with: /fd do you see the kernel recognizing your fd with a line of reference? If the floppy disk drive works from Linux, then try to image the boot disk that works onto the HD in a file: # cat /dev/fd0 > /tmp/my.img then get a new, blank floppy disk and cat the image to that: # cat /tmp/my.img > /fd0 If both the original boot and the new one just created can be booted, then I would examine corruption on your other boot floppies. Beg/borrow/steal a boot floppy tested to work on another machine immediately before testing on the one with problems. If problems still found, bring disk back to original machine to see if it still works. Feedback would be good. :-) Thanks! -ME -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS/CM$/IT$/LS$/S/O$ !d--(++) !s !a+++(-----) C++$(++++) U++++$(+$) P+$>+++ L+++$(++) E W+++$(+) N+ o K w+$>++>+++ O-@ M+$ V-$>- !PS !PE Y+ !PGP t@-(++) 5+@ X@ R- tv- b++ DI+++ D+ G--@ e+>++>++++ h(++)>+ r*>? z? ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ decode: http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/ about: http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html Systems Department Operating Systems Analyst for the SSU Library
