*BSD News Article 13005


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From: dfox@quack.kfu.com (David Fox)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: questions about floppy support
Message-ID: <f0JUYsY@quack.kfu.com>
Date: 18 Mar 93 18:40:27 GMT
References: <BOOT.93Mar17172729@donald.osf.org>
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
Lines: 38

In article <BOOT.93Mar17172729@donald.osf.org> boot@osf.org writes:
>
>I'm having some difficulties using floppies under 386BSD. I'm running
>under 0.1 with the latest patchkit installed, on a 486DX2 66. I either
>get hard errors from the floppy driver, or errors because the floppy
>driver doesn't support certain ioctls. For example, I think newfs
>tries to get the geometry of the floppy via an ioctl, and this fails
>because the fd.c driver just returns ENXIO for ANY ioctl on the floppy
>device.

With respect to newfs, I don't think it's supposed to guess the geometry
of the disk; you're supposed to say

newfs /dev/fd0a floppy5 (5.25 inch 1.2 in a:)
newfs /dev/fd1a floppy3 (3.5 inch 1.44 in b:)


>I'm having a hard time believing no one uses floppy drives under
>386BSD, but they sure don't work for me. Has anyone had better luck?

I use floppies and they work for me within limitations.  I can't do
360K or 720K on a 5.25 double density with the current fd driver, and
still can't format disks.

>Bruce Bauman	email: boot@osf.org		phone: 617-621-7205
>Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142



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