[gentoo-dev] Can't format floppy or write to it...

[Branko Badrljica]

I needed to make bootable floppy for graphic card BIOS reflash and 
noticed that I can't fdformat floppy or even write to formatted one.

I can mount it -o rw, but when I try to write, write would fail.

Also, "fdformat /dev/fd0" seems to be working, but just to the 
point,where it verifies written and fails on track 0.

I have checked:

- floppies for write protection ( it was off )
- for dirt on heads- I have cleaned floppy thoroughly
- bad unit. Exchanged it with another, with exactly same result.
- bad floppy disk. Tried a few other, with same result. Same disks 
formatted on another Windoze machine just fine.
- bad access flags on /dev/fd0. (" Access: (0660/brw-rw----) Uid: ( 0/ 
root) Gid: ( 11/ floppy)" )

Here is output of "fdformat /dev/fd0":

 >LANG="en" fdformat /dev/fd0

 >Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB.
 >Formatting ... done
 >Verifying ... Problem reading cylinder 1, expected 18432, read 2048


and here is dmesg | tail:

>
> Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 32
> end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 288
> Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 36
> end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 308
> Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 38
> end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 333
> Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 41
> end_request: I/O error, dev fd0, sector 45
> Buffer I/O error on device fd0, logical block 5

Machine:
Phenom 9950
Boartd Foxconn A7DA-S
8 Gig RAM.
nVidia 8800GT with 1GiG RAM DDR3
DVD+ RW unit
floppy
2x 500 Gb HDD SATA

Gentoo 64-bit ( 2008.0-desktop profile )
pretty much latest version of everything
kernel gentoo-sources-2.6.28-r1


Has anyone noticed anything remotely similar ?
I can recall being able to use floppy normally with older 2.6.27 
kernels, but can't try this now...


Regards,

Branko