[Coco] Re: 5 1/4" floppies and Linux

[Richard E. Crislip]

Hello Ken

On 11/09/2005, Ken Carlin wrote:
>
> I'm having a heck of a time getting a 360K 5 1/4" floppy working
> correctly under Linux, and I'm wondering if there's anyone on the list
> who could help me.
>
> I have a 3 1/2" 1.44meg floppy as drive A and a 5 1/4" 360K floppy as
> drive B.  They are configured that way in my BIOS.  The drive jumper of
> the 5 1/4" is set to be the second drive (DS1 in this case), and it is
> hooked up on the first connector on the drive cable (before the
> "twist") and the 3 1/2" drive is at the end of the cable.
>
> It all works fine under Windows 98.  The DSKINI and RETRIEVE utilities
> work correctly, and I can create a bootable NitrOS9 5 1/4" disk from a
> .dsk image on nitros9.org.
>
> However...
>
> Under Linux (Suse 9.2), only the 3 1/2" works as expected.  I can
> create a readable 720K disk with it from a .dsk image.  The 5 1/4" is a
> different story.  No matter what I seem to try, it won't format
> (fdformat /dev/fd1) and errors out telling me either illegal address or
> drive not present.
>
> I've tried 3 different floppy drives, and all have the same result.  I
> even tried a 1.2meg 5 1/4, and I came heartbreakingly close to making a
> readable floppy.  It formatted and appeared to copy the image
> correctly, but only the root directory was readable under NitrOS9 on
> the Coco.
>
> I should also mention that I've been using Linux for a grand total of 3
> days now, so I'm a complete novice.
>
> Any help that anyone can offer will be appreciated.

Red flags are going off here. Is it possible you are running up against
hardware incompatibilities here? It seem to me that I heard smoewhere in
the distant past that older drives will not work in newer systems.

Regards
-- 
Cruising on AutoPilot                       |
        With an Amiga           ---o-o-O-o-o---  and a CoCo