Re: cannot format floppy
From: Bill Vermillion (bv_at_wjv.comREMOVE)
Date: 11/14/03
- Next message: Adam K Kirchhoff: "Re: devfs?"
- Previous message: Steve O'Hara-Smith: "Re: upgrading bsd"
- In reply to: jpd: "Re: cannot format floppy"
- Next in thread: jpd: "Re: cannot format floppy"
- Reply: jpd: "Re: cannot format floppy"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 18:25:01 GMT
In article <1068747686.433793@ente.ipberlin.com>,
jpd <read_the_sig@do.not.spam.it> wrote:
>In article <HoAtuB.1EIq@wjv.com>, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>[snip]
>>
>> IRQs which are essential in multi-tasking OSs have to be set in
>> many cases in DOS but ARE NEVER USED as they poll the devices
>> instead. I've seen instances of broken interupt HW that works
>> in the MS world, but would never work in the *n*x world.
>Notably shoddy printer cards. Some of those even have all the support but
>miss a single wire from a pin on one chip to a pin on the other.
>OS/2 suffered a lot there, too. Same problem.
>Back to floppies, I agree with Bill: floppies are bad and best to be
>avoided. I've tried formatting and re-formatting when they /nearly/ but
>not really failed, and you can even get them to somewhat recover for a
>while. But the best remedy is to throw them away at first sign of
>trouble. They simply are not worth the effort and frustration. Some
>people buy afresh for each (very rare) occasion they need them and
>throw them away afterwards.
There are times when you do need floppies. I never trust them
new.
What I did was take a pure DOS distribution disk - one that had
never had it's write protect removed - and dd'ed the first
track to a file.
Then I just had a small script that looped, formatted the disk
under whatever *n*x system I was using [I've been doing this since
the late 1980s], and then dd'ed the DOS boot track onto the first
track, then it paused and beeped.
If I saw a bad verify on the format it went into the trash, stick
in a new disk and hit enter.
I do this while doing something else and I >KNOW< I have disks
that have been formatted and verifed completely, and not done on
some high-speed formatter at a factory cranking things out.
While high-speed formats usually work, it's just not worth the
frustraton and time lost trying to copy something to a floppy that
did not work.
And when [on an old Esic V.3 system] I had to use floppies to store
many things, I'd tar to the floppy and used a program called
checktar - from alt.sources around 1990 or 1991. You would
tar the files and then checktar would do a bit level verify to
ensure that the floppy matched the HD image. I never did get
around to modifying it for FreeBSD [it is an old SysV3 thing] as
I don't use those anymore except for emergency boot things.
But - 2 or 3 years ago I grabbed all the 3.5" disks from about 1988
thru 1993 and spun them off to CD. I had one file on one disk that
was not readable. I attribute that to my own QC beofre using them.
I've been working with magnetic media all of my life [so far]
and am comfortable with it as I've learned all it's foibles.
Putting in 70+ hours/week for several years in a recording studio
environment you see almost everything that can be done wrong - and
it tranlates to all media in all enviroments.
I got so I could tell the brand and model number of the tape I was
using just by the smell.
Bill
hi
-- Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
- Next message: Adam K Kirchhoff: "Re: devfs?"
- Previous message: Steve O'Hara-Smith: "Re: upgrading bsd"
- In reply to: jpd: "Re: cannot format floppy"
- Next in thread: jpd: "Re: cannot format floppy"
- Reply: jpd: "Re: cannot format floppy"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Relevant Pages
|
