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Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 21:44:42 +1000
From: David Dawes <dawes@rf900.physics.usyd.edu.au>
To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Floppy trouble contd.
References: <199709120632.XAA13197@palrel3.hp.com>
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In-Reply-To: <199709120632.XAA13197@palrel3.hp.com>; from A Joseph Koshy on Fri, Sep 12, 1997 at 11:58:43AM +0530
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On Fri, Sep 12, 1997 at 11:58:43AM +0530, A Joseph Koshy wrote:
>
>gl> most expensive per byte.  But I'm getting the feeling that there is
>gl> more to it than that, that possibly there's a bug in the floppy driver
>gl> and that we're blaming it on the inherent unreliability of the medium.
>
>gl> 1.  Floppy formatted under <insert your OS here> on the same machine.
>gl> 2.  FreeBSD runs into hardware problems with the floppy (typically
>gl>     things like checksum errors).
>gl> 3.  <insert your OS here> can read the entire floppy with no trouble.
>
>
>I've seen (1), (2), and (3).  After a (2), doing a format using the freebsd
>tools sometimes helps, but see below.
>
>I've also seen that formatting 3-4 times under FreeBSD (fdwrite or fdformat)
>causes the floppy to become unuseable, even under DOS.
>
>I've seen these on just too many floppies, new, used, of various brands,
>to dismiss it as due to the unreliability of the medium.

I too have seen behaviour similar to this, particularly a relatively large
number of new floppies that have errors on FreeBSD (sometimes formatting
with fdformat helps, sometimes not).  I've usually assumed that they were
bad disks (but that is getting harder to believe).  I was beginning to
suspect the drive.  Next time I run into this problem I'll do some more
testing.

David