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Date:      Fri, 24 Sep 2004 15:53:22 -0000
From:      William Palfreman <william@palfreman.com>
To:        dwbear75@gmail.com
Cc:        hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 5.25" Floppy
Message-ID:  <20030207180944.F283@ndhn.yna.cnyserzna.pbz>
In-Reply-To: <3E436DBE.3020200@ameritech.net>
References:  <3E436DBE.3020200@ameritech.net>

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On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, northern snowfall wrote:

>  Morning, all;
>      I'm trying to get a Mitsumi D509V3 1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive
>  to work on FreeBSD 4.2.6.

Cool.  My father still has a 5.25" drive in production use - he has
large numbers of 5.25 disks containing old work, and maybe once a
year needs something off one of them.  Works fine on his W2k box.

> The operating system reports the drive
>  is available and definitely makes contact with the drive (visual
>  confirmation: LED). The issue is during read/write from the
>  drive. Error message:
>      fd0c: hard error reading fsbn 0 (No status)
>  I have the proper drive type set in the BIOS. FreeBSD seems to
>  agree according to the dmesg:
>      fd0: <1200-KB 5.25" drive> on fdc0 drive 0
>  I've been doing simple read tests using:
>      dd if=/dev/fd0 count=1 bs=512 | hexdump ;
>  Any suggestions?

Drive might be broken, disk might be broken, disk might not be
formated, and finally make sure you know what kind of 5.25 both the
drive and the disk are. 8088/86 machines stated off with single sided 8
sector one @160k, then double sided 8 sector (320k), then single sided 9
sector (180k), then double sided 9 sector (360k).  That was the
standard.  AT machines (i.e. 286s and later 386s & 486s) used 1.2Mb
5.25" disks.  These AT drives could read 360k PC disks (PC = 8086/88,
BTW) but if you wrote to one there was a very good chance it would never
be readable by a PC again, because the 1.2Mb AT drive had a read/write
head 1/3 of the size of the 360Kb PC drive, and often the mark it left
was too small to be read by larger PC heads.  For that reason I always
treated 360k disks as read-only media on 1.2Mb drives.

As other people have said, /dev/fd0.1200 and /dev/fd0.360 look like you
friends here.  Personally I don't bother compiling fd stuff into the
kernel any more.

- -- 
W. Palfreman.
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