Alain Knaff wrote:
On 10/11/09 17:42, ael wrote:
I tried setting the density to dd instead of hd -- something that I
had also tried on fdformat without success. gfloppy managed to
Sorry. I think I should have posted more about that, but the report was
so long already that I held back.
I subsequently discovered that gfloppy was "lying". It turned out that
the format had not succeeded after all. It was just that gfloppy did not
not always report the error. Thereafter it was possible to build a file
system, ext2 IIRC, but when it was used CRC errors appeared.
This is indeed very useful information, sorry to have not spotted this
earlier. Double density disks cannot be formatted as high density. Not only
because of the higher surface quality of HD disks, but more importantly
because the presence or not of the density select hole switches the _drive_
into the appropriate mode.
Yes, I realise that, although I had forgotten the details. The discs are
quite certainly HD with the holes open. As I say, I can read and write
on to previously formatted discs, so I think that shows that the hole
and leds in the drives are all working correctly. Agreed?
My experiments with dd and the like was just to see what would happen
If both disagree, formatting will fail.
I wonder if somehow the formatting software is always going into dd mode?
[..snip..]
verify to around track 73.
This now is probably due to poor quality of disk (maybe due to age?). It's
mostly the higher tracks that fail, because on them the spatial density is
highest (these are the innermost tracks, thus shorter, but they still
contain the same amount of data => more bits crammed into less surface).
I have tried maybe 4 different discs, one brand new. I think all of the
other discs were previously working. My initial suspicions were all
around the media, and I did a lot of experiments on different machines
with different media before deciding it had to be software.
Just to make absolutely certain, I have just booted up the old redhat
machine and successfully formatted and verified one of the "failing"
discs. (fdformat.) So, no, I don't think media problems exist.
Thanks for the reply. I am still mystified. Could I somehow, somewhere,
in 3 debian testing machines have some common configuration file wrong?
Weird, very weird.
ael
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
