Re: [SLUG] R/O Floppies

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Thu Sep 12 2002 - 18:15:20 EDT


On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 08:52:06AM -0400, Ian C. Blenke wrote:

> 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?
> > > >

<snip>

> 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?
>

Yep, that fails. And no entry in mount table. This is an intermittent
problem, but when it does show up, it _stays_ until a reboot.

> # 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.
>

I didn't look at mtab, since it's dynamically generated. As I say, it's
an intermittent problem. Next time it shows up, I'll check this.

> 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 ;)

I'll have to wait until the problem happens again. I'll save this for
that event. I finally reset the box, which solved the problem. Well,
"solved" is maybe too strong a word. ;-}

Paul



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