From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Apr 10 17:55:55 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0107337B41B for ; Wed, 10 Apr 2002 17:55:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from walton.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 11 Apr 2002 01:55:38 +0100 (BST) To: "Vladislav V. Zhuk" Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: very old bug In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 Apr 2002 14:06:05 +0300." <20020410110605.GJ82820@dru.dn.ua> Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 01:55:36 +0100 From: Ian Dowse Message-ID: <200204110155.aa50726@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <20020410110605.GJ82820@dru.dn.ua>, "Vladislav V. Zhuk" writes: >After attempt to write data to write-protected floppy >(or diskette with bad blocks) FreeBSD die. > >It's VERY VERY annoying... :( > >Who can fix this bug?? Unfortunately, this is believed to be very hard to fix, so the best recommendation is that you avoid mounting filesystems from floppy disks. For most uses of floppies, the "mtools" package is a far nicer way to copy files back and forth anyway, and it does not suffer from any of the problems with corrupted floppies, write-protected floppies, forgetting to unmount the floppy before ejecting it etc. If desired, you can also change the permissions on the floppy device so that users can access use mtools commands without having to su to root first. If you haven't used mtools before, it is a set of commands that allow you to access msdos-formatted disks by running commands all prefixed by an "m", e.g "mdir", "mcd a:/dir", "mcopy file a:". The real problem with mounting filesystems from floppies is that the reliability expectations of floppies are so different from normal disks. If the kernel detects filesystem corruption on a hard disk, it is actually more likely to be a kernel fault (maybe due to faulty memory or a software bug) than a failure of the disk, so the safest thing to do is panic to avoid possibly making things worse. Admittedly, FreeBSD's inability to force write-protected disks to be mounted read-only is pretty bad though... Ian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message