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Date: 2 Jan 1997 21:34:09 GMT
From: peter@spinner.DIALix.COM (Peter Wemm)
Message-ID: <5ah9kh$8rh$4@haywire.DIALix.COM>
Organization: DIALix Services, Perth, Australia.
References: <13734.852200758@time.cdrom.com>
Subject: Re: Did my floppy drive just break or does fdformat no longer work?
Sender: owner-current@freebsd.org
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In article <199701021147.MAA06507@uriah.heep.sax.de>,
	j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) writes:
> As Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> 
>> Running a kernel built as of this morning from -current, I can no longer
>> format floppies - I get a cascade of kernel warning messages:
>> 
>> jkh@time-> fd0c: hard error reading fsbn 18 of 16-19 (ST0 44<abnrml,top_head> ST1 4<sec_not_fnd> ST2 0 cyl 0 hd 1 sec 1)
>> fd0c: hard error reading fsbn 18 of 16-19 (ST0 44<abnrml,top_head> ST1 4<sec_not_fnd> ST2 0 cyl 0 hd 1 sec 1)
>> ...
> 
> Nothing dramatically has been changed in the floppy driver, not that i
> could think of.  Perhaps you simply try swapping drives first?
> 
> Well, it happens at the first access to head 1, so perhaps the `top
> head' of your drive is dead.

Just as a BTW, the drive in this machine (spinner) cannot write to
floppy, whatsoever.  It reports that it succeeded, but reading it afterwards
returns the original data.  Quite disconcerting.  :-) I've meant to swap
the drive and cables etc to see if it's hardware, but never got around to
it (there's another machine right next to it that works fine).

-Peter