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Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 20:58:19 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Jay D. Nelson" <jdn@qiv.com>
To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>,
        FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: Do *you* have problems with floppies?
In-Reply-To: <19970912101014.37786@lemis.com>
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Sorry, I can't offer any help with software bugs. I've used an
odd-ball assortment of floppies since 2.0 with less than 5% failure. I
rarely bother to reformat. I dd the image to /dev/fd0 and am as happy
as a pig in a mud hole. I'm using Mitsumis now, but have used Teacs and
Sonys equally well. If there's a bug, I haven't seen it.

I would suspect the ability of a MicroS**t product to do anything
rational with questionable media. Maybe the dos program (rawrite?)
needs to make up for Redmond's short comings?

-- Jay 

On Fri, 12 Sep 1997, Greg Lehey wrote:

    > I've seen a lot of reports recently about problems with floppies under
    > FreeBSD.  Now I can understand a lot of that: floppies must be the
    > most unreliable data storage medium I can think of, not to mention the
    > most expensive per byte.  But I'm getting the feeling that there is
    > more to it than that, that possibly there's a bug in the floppy driver
    > and that we're blaming it on the inherent unreliability of the medium.
    > 
    > I'm looking for indications which would point towards the driver.  One
    > of these might be:
    > 
    > 1.  Floppy formatted under <insert your OS here> on the same machine.
    > 2.  FreeBSD runs into hardware problems with the floppy (typically
    >     things like checksum errors).
    > 3.  <insert your OS here> can read the entire floppy with no trouble.
    > 
    > If you can give me hard evidence of such occurrences, I'd like to hear
    > from you.  I know that plenty of people can tell me that they've had
    > occurrences of (2), maybe in conjunction with (1), but unless you can
    > prove (3) as well, I don't want to hear from you.
    > 
    > In addition, if you have any other evidence I haven't thought of which
    > would also point to an error in the floppy driver, please contact me.
    > 
    > Greg