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Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 10:10:14 +0930
From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.org>
Cc: FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.org>
Subject: Do *you* have problems with floppies?
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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