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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!hammer.uoregon.edu!news.uoregon.edu!Symiserver2.symantec.com!news From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Can ft format, or can't it? Date: 17 Nov 1996 19:39:46 GMT Organization: Symantec Corp. Lines: 29 Message-ID: <56npm2$b6o@Symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <56it57$fjh@news.gvsu.edu> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: shiva1.central.com X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <56it57$fjh@news.gvsu.edu>, behrensm@river.it.gvsu.edu (Matt Behrens) writes: >Hi all, > [some deleted] > >"The `ft' driver is available for QIC-80 "floppy tape" support. The >drivers support formatting both tapes and disks. This driver is >substantially improved from that shipped in previous releases of FreeBSD." > >As far as I can tell, this little snippet refers to FreeBSD 1.1.5. Am I The problem with floppy tapes is that the floppy disk drive controller is basically treating them like giant floppy disk drives. Floppy disk drives have to have timing marks written to the surface of the media during the formatting process, later when the controller is reading and writing data to them it uses these timing marks. If you can get your floppy tape drive to work at all with FreeBSD (which is going to be some work to start with) you will find far better success using pre-formatted tape media than attempting to format your own. The floppy disk controller hardware is often very crummy and buggy and on DOS is often timing-dependent. Pre-formatted tape media is formatted in machines that precisely lay out the timing marks over the length of the tape media. Even if you can get the ft driver to format tapes in your machine, there is a good chance that they will be unreadable in any other floppy tape drive simply due to slight variations in how the media is formatted.