Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 21 Feb 2003 17:09:53 +0200 | From | Matti Aarnio <> | Subject | Genericish floppy-driver problem ? (2.4/2.5) |
| |
In my Dell Laptop, I have a 3.5" diskette driver plugin, which works fine, when I do normal things, but earlier this week I had a "mystery diskette" to decode, and pull data out.
The diskette in question was written in a "DD" driver, but used media was of "HD" type. The end result was that its format was "wrong" for the media, and reading it failed. A quick transformation of a "HD" diskette into a "DD" type is explained at site:
http://fdutils.linux.lu/disk-id.html
where there are also many tests to discover things about the diskette data format. To read the "DD format in HD media" diskette successfully, "rate=2" parameter was necessary in tests done in that page to determine various parameters of the diskette. (That is, a "taped-up-DD" media is formatted into 720 kB capacity, and then the tape is removed getting a "DD in disguise" media format)
While using that utility with 2.4.20-redhat-rawhide-xyz kernel, and following the instructions to determine what the data really is in there, execution of command:
fdrawcmd read 0 1 0 1 2 0 0x1b 0xff length=10240 need_seek track=1 >/dev/null
did cause the floppy driver to yield some kernel error dump, and any floppy command after that did return EXIO error. Only reboot restored the driver back to sanity.
A sticky error state is, of course, considerable as a bug in this case. Is this really worth the effort to fix ? I am not sure.
The Floppy driver (drivers/block/floppy.c) does not appear to have listed MAINTAINER, but many people have touched on it over the years.
/Matti Aarnio - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |