[vox-tech] floppy woes

[Jeff Newmiller]

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Alexandra Thorn wrote:

> 
> 
> Been trying to create a boot disk on my RedHat 7.2 system at work.  Bought
> a pack of PC formatted disks (I *should* be able to reformat easily
> enough, shouldn't I?).  Set to work trying to create a boot disk.
> Couldn't tell what was going on (i.e. going wrong) with qmkbootdisk (the
> GUI version) so switched to mkbootdisk.
> 
> So far I've tried two disks from the 10-pack.  Both exhibit the same
> problems on Linux.  They seem to be both readable and writeable on both
> Macintosh and Windows systems, though.  I tried reformatting them on the
> Macintosh, first to Mac (which resulted in evidently successful
> reformatting, but behaved exactly the same way as the original formatting
> on the Linux machine) and then to ProDOS 1.4 MB (which resulted in the
> Mac spitting out the disk complaining that the disk could not be erased
> because it was defective).

Since the disks are writable on other machines, I think Mark missed the
boat.

> 
> Would appreciate any insight anyone may have into the following errors.
> 
> [root@ars164 Thorn]# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
> mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only

never mount before formatting.

The fact that it is saying it is read only when you do attempt to mount it
suggests that the drive is telling the computer that the disk is read
only.  Is there something stuck in the drive blocking the sensor that
detects the presence of the write protect tab?  Do any other disks work rw
in that drive?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Newmiller                        The     .....       .....  Go Live...
DCN:<jdnewmil@dcn.davis.ca.us>        Basics: ##.#.       ##.#.  Live Go...
                                      Live:   OO#.. Dead: OO#..  Playing
Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries            O.O#.       #.O#.  with
/Software/Embedded Controllers)               .OO#.       .OO#.  rocks...2k
---------------------------------------------------------------------------