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From: Mr M P Searle <csubl@csv.warwick.ac.uk>
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Subject: Re: floppy flaky
In-Reply-To: <19970520132403.10028.qmail@squirrel.tgsoft.com> from mark thompson at "May 20, 97 01:24:03 pm"
To: thompson@squirrel.tgsoft.com (mark thompson)
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 16:41:30 +0100 (BST)
Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.com
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>    Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 08:50:19 +0200
>    From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
> 
>    As mark thompson wrote:
> 
>    > Pretty strange, that no errors are reported, huh? Floppy drive, cable,
>    > controller, software? 
> 
>    Writing a floppy can only detect catastrophic errors (sector marks not
>    found).  Data-field only errors remain undetected.
> 
>    Reformat your floppy.
> 
> True. But the read should detect a bad checksum, not just return bad
> bits, nicht wahr? And besides, i DID reformat the floppies, it still
> failed pretty much the same.

Well, I've had reads from floppies return bad data as well - there was a
stream of timeout errors (which I always get using floppies), but nothing
unusual. I think Imust have a dodgy fdd though - sometimes I get 'unable
to seek to track n' errors (where n is often 20 or 40), which are often
followed by a freeze. :( (The floppy disk itself is OK here - reboot and
try again, and the disk is OK.)

> 
> I'm flummoxed.
> 
> -mark
>