I gave up trying to use a floppy

tashirosgt · #1 27th January 2010, 05:32 AM

A summary of my experience with floppies and Fedora (starting at FC2 and continuing to FC 12) is "Fedora eats floppies". At least it destroys them in my hands. Both floppies and floppy drives are an imperfect technology, but that cannot explain the many floppies that I have ruined using many different machines and floppy drives and versions of Fedora. ( And I'm always careful to mount and unmount floppies. I don't pop them out without waiting for the system to finish its work on them.)

Having spent a few hours trying to put the files for a BIOS flash on a DOS bot disk, I destroyed most of my DOS boot disks. (I used to be able to make them using an image and the "dd" command, but FC 12 doesn't like the option "of = /dev/fd0" or "of=" anything else I could think of.) So I consulted the web and found this wonderful page: http://www.linuxinsight.com/how-to-f...ppy-drive.html

I tried it and it works. These were old motherboards so there was still a computer comedy to play out. The machines had SATA DVD-RWs. Setting the first bood device to "CDROM" wouldn't boot from them. I put on an IDE CD-R temporarily to get around this.

droidhacker · #2 27th January 2010, 04:56 PM

You may not be aware of this, but if your bios supports booting off a USB stick (i.e. it DOES unless you are messing around with ancient junk), you can use DOS by way of USB.

tashirosgt · #3 27th January 2010, 05:59 PM

I was messing around with ancient junk: Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra SLI It has a built-in "Q-Flash" program in the BIOS which doesn't recognize anything but floppies. It also apparently doesn't work. Fortunately the motherboard has "dual BIOS" so when it failed to post with the BIOS I flashed, it automatically flashed itself back to an old BIOS. When I used the bootable CD with the flash *.exe program and the same BIOS files, the BIOS flashes worked fine.

The link I gave has a post which mentions the existence of a Linux project to create a program running in a normal Linux environment to flash BIOSes - not only motherboard BIOSes but also BIOSes on ethernet cards etc.

stoat · #4 27th January 2010, 11:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tashirosgt

(I used to be able to make them using an image and the "dd" command, but FC 12 doesn't like the option "of = /dev/fd0" or "of=" anything else I could think of.)

Hello tashirosgt,

I can't really explain your troubles with floppies and floppy drives in general. But regarding the described difficulties in Fedora 12 with /dev/fd0, you might be interested in this... There was at least one Fedora 12 kernel (2.6.31.6-145.fc12.i686.PAE) that, for me at least, did not include the file floppy-pnp.conf in the /etc/modprobe.d folder of its initramfs image file. The result was that the floppy module was not loaded. During the life of that particular kernel, the floppy module still could be manually loaded in the usual well-known ways with the modprobe command, or by manually creating the floppy-pnp.conf file in the /etc/modprobe.d folder of the Fedora 12 system (I copied it from Fedora 11). Anyway, the very next kernel was back to normal vis-a-vis this floppy module business, and I haven't had to do anything like this since then.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=236407
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=236432

I still have floppy diskettes and working floppy drives. And like you, I also still occasionally make a boot floppy (DOS, XP, or GRUB) from .img files to /dev/fd0 using dd. Today I tried it again in Fedora 12 just to see if it still works. It does...

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# uname -r
2.6.31.9-174.fc12.i686.PAE

[root@localhost GRUB]# dd if=grub_floppy_97-33.img of=/dev/fd0
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 0.0573544 s, 25.7 MB/s

And the resulting boot disk worked. So if you can't write to /dev/fd0 with dd in Fedora 12, check the lsmod report for the floppy module. If it's not there, then you can manually load it and do the things with /dev/fd0 that you've always done before.

tashirosgt · #5 28th January 2010, 04:05 AM

That's interesting info. Kernel 2.6.31.9-174.fc12.x86_64 is what is on my system after a recent update from the FC 12 install. There is no floppy-pnp.conf file in /etc/modprobe.d.

Still, I can mount a floppy with mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy -t vfat. I can copy files to and from the floppy with "cp". However, there is no "/dev/fd0" in my file system. Instead there is a "/dev/fd" directory with files "0", "1", "2"., "3".

The copying process seems to gradually corrupt the floppy. When I unmount the the floppy and run fschk, it reports that there are two non-matching FATs. After more copying, it reports that the floppy has a bad superblock.

I tried using mknod to create a /dev/ fd0h1440. That "worked" the same way as fd0 and destroyed floppies also. When I rebooted, /dev/fd0h1440 was gone.

stoat · #6 28th January 2010, 04:50 AM

I just checked, and I also do not have /etc/floppy-pnp.conf. My current kernel is the i686 PAE version of yours (2.6.31.9-174.fc12.i686.PAE). I upacked and examined its initramfs file, and there is no floppy-pnp.conf file in it either. But I do have the modprobe floppy command in /etc/rc.local, and the floppy module is loaded. I also have all of the usual fd devices in /dev. I forgot that I decided to deal with it that way. Anyway, I don't have any floppy issues with Fedora 12 now.

PabloTwo · #7 28th January 2010, 03:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tashirosgt

.....However, there is no "/dev/fd0" in my file system. Instead there is a "/dev/fd" directory with files "0", "1", "2"., "3".

At the risk of coming across as actually knowing what I am talking about, those /dev/fd/x have absolutely nothing to do with a floppy disk device, though I admit, it's awfully tempting to think so especially since, now, /dev/fd0 and floppy are now now gone from the /dev/ directory in F12.

If you do a ls -l on those, you will see that they are actually just symlinks to /dev/pts/x

Code:

 BASH:~/-> ll /dev/fd/0
lrwx------. 1 paulm root 64 2010-01-28 09:55 /dev/fd/0 -> /dev/pts/0

Further investigation would seem to reveal that the /dev/pts's are for pseudo-tty slave devices:

Code:

BASH:~/-> cat /proc/tty/drivers
/dev/tty             /dev/tty        5       0 system:/dev/tty
/dev/console         /dev/console    5       1 system:console
/dev/ptmx            /dev/ptmx       5       2 system
/dev/vc/0            /dev/vc/0       4       0 system:vtmaster
usbserial            /dev/ttyUSB   188 0-253 serial
serial               /dev/ttyS       4 64-95 serial
pty_slave            /dev/pts      136 0-1048575 pty:slave
pty_master           /dev/ptm      128 0-1048575 pty:master
unknown              /dev/tty        4 1-63 console

So, attempting to mount or write to a floppy disk via /dev/fd/0 would be futile.

From an earlier post by stoat regarding the MIA floppy device, I added the floppy-pnp.conf file to /etc/modprobe.d/ as he suggested. Though I currently have that file commented out by adding a "~" to the end of the file name, it's there for me if and when I decide to use it. But in reality, just doing "sudo mobprobe floppy" is a much quicker way to get the floppy device on an "as needed" basis than editing the file name and rebooting.

And an aside to stoat: Since I know you are an XFCE user, I spent my entire time in F8/XFCE trying to figure out how to get rid of the Desktop "floppy drive" icon but still retain the removable devices option so that other removable devices such as USB thumb drives would auto mount and present a Desktop icon when inserted. F12/XFCE solved the problem for me, by not initializing a floppy device in the first place

Now why didn't I think of that before?

tashirosgt · #8 28th January 2010, 04:19 PM

That makes me wonder what is going on when I do a " mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy -t vfat". I certainly have the impression that "cp" writes files to the floppy - although in some imperfect manner.

mobprobe -l shows that I do have "kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko".

PabloTwo · #9 28th January 2010, 04:38 PM

"modprobe -l" lists all the kmods available, whether they are loaded or not.

Code:

BASH:~/-> modprobe -l | grep floppy
kernel/drivers/block/floppy.ko

"lsmod" will display the "loaded" kernel modules.

Code:

BASH:~/-> lsmod | grep floppy
BASH:~/->

This is on stock kernel 2.6.31.12-174.2.3.fc12.i686. Without the floppy.ko loaded, there is no "/dev/fd0". Once the floppy.ko is loaded, the "/dev/fd0" and symlink "floppy" will appear in /dev/. If you are successfully able to mount /dev/fd0 without actually having a /dev/fd0, I am both surprised and puzzled how that is possible.

Have you as yet tried doing "modprobe floppy", as root of course, give it several seconds to fully initialize, then mount (or letting it auto-mount if it inclined to do so on it's own) the floppy disk when inserted, then writing to the floppy disk?

If you have done that already and still get serious write errors on the floppy, then I would suspect the floppy drive itself is going bad (gee... let me think how many floppy disk drives have gone bad on me in years past....... hmmm.... lost count)

tashirosgt · #10 28th January 2010, 05:40 PM

OK, lsmod shows I do NOT have the floppy module loaded - which makes it even more mysterious to me why I can apparently execute the command "mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy -t vfat" and "cp" a file to the floppy. (The drive light comes on and the drive spins. It looks very convincing.) I don't have the floppy module loaded and I also don't have any device called "/dev/fd0".