Re: [SLUG] R/O Floppies

From: Ian C. Blenke (icblenke@nks.net)
Date: Wed Sep 11 2002 - 08:52:06 EDT


On Tue, 2002-09-10 at 21:19, Paul M Foster wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 07:39:15PM -0400, Ronan Heffernan wrote:
>
> > Paul M Foster wrote:
> > >I've got a Debian 3.0 system (2.4.18) that's telling me plainly R/W ext2
> > >floppies are read only. Anyone know how to convince the system to mount
> > >the floppy R/W regardless of what it thinks? Or some other way to get
> > >around the problem?
> > >
> > >Paul
> > >
> >
> > Paul-
> > Are the little plastic Write-protect sliders in the closed position?
> > With modern floppy drives, there is no software way around that.
> >
> > --ronan
> >
>
> Umm, that's why I said "plainly R/W"-- the tabs are in the R/W position;
> I never mess with them. And no, the fstab doesn't say the floppy is R/O.
> And I'd really rather not resort to a power cycle. ;-} Sometimes issues
> like this go away after the machine has had a chance to sit overnight;
> some sort of timeout issue, I imagine. But I was hoping for something
> more direct. I believe I've read that the floppy drivers in Linux are
> buggy. That's true as far as I'm concerned, because I've seen other
> issues with them before, and with some regularity.

So, with the floppy RW notch in the RW position, you're still unable to
get a RW filesystem using:

        # mount -t ext2 -o rw /dev/fd0 /mnt

This fails for you? What does your mount table show?

        # cat /proc/mounts

The mount command likes to look at and use /etc/mtab, which sometimes
gets out of sync with how the kernel thinks things are mounted.

Mounting a floppy read-write works just fine for me.

How about this:

        # dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/floppy.img bs=18k
        # mount -o loop -t ext2 /tmp/floppy.img /mnt
        {copy things to /mnt}
        # umount /mnt
        # dd if=/tmp/floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k

This would help narrow down the problem a bit. This should narrow down
wether it's a device permissions problem (/dev/fd0), a failed floppy RW
sensor, a filesystem permissions problem (/mnt after mounted), or a
kernel bug. Is there anything in your kernel log?

        # dmesg | tail

No problems mounting ext2 floppies RW here. I run debian 3.0 pretty much
everywhere these days. Sparc included ;)

- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net> <ian@blenke.com>
http://ian.blenke.com



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